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 A HISTORY 
 
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 OUR OWN TIMES 
 
 FROM THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA 
 TO THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 
 
 WITH AN APPENDIX OF EVENTS TO THE END OF 1886 
 
 BY 
 
 JUSTIN M C CARTHY 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. 
 
 A NEW IMPRESSION 
 
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 CHATTO & WINDUS 
 
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 KIADF AND PRIMTrp 
 IN GREAT BRITAIN!
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE FIKST VOLUME. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE KING is DEAD ! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN ! . . . i 
 
 II. STATESMEN AND PARTIES 14 
 
 III. CANADA AND LORD DURHAM 26 
 
 IV. SCIENCE AND SPEED 44 
 
 V. CHARTISM 54 
 
 VI. QcEsrioy DE Jupoys 68 
 
 VII. THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE 77 
 
 VIII. THE OPIUM WAR 88 
 
 IX. DECLINE AND FALL OP THE WHIG MINISTRY .... 98 
 
 X. MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES 110 
 
 XI. THE DISASTERS OF CABUL 120 
 
 XII. THE REPEAL YEAR 145 
 
 XIII. PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION 162 
 
 XIV. FREE TRADE AND THE LEAGUE 173 
 
 XV. FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND 11)3 
 
 XVI. MR. DISRAELI 205 
 
 XVII. FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, AND FOREIGN INTRIGUE . 221 
 
 XVIII. CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND 23:? 
 
 XIX. DON PACIFICO 255 
 
 XX. THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL 273 
 
 XXI. THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK ..., = . 288 
 
 XXII. PALMERSTON , 298 
 
 XXIII. BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF 'THE DUKE' . , .321 
 
 XXIV. MR. GLADSTONE 341
 
 vi CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 CHAPTElt PA6E 
 
 XXV. THE EASTERN QUESTION 349 
 
 XXVI. WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 372 
 
 XXVII. THE INVASION OP THE CRIMEA 390 
 
 XXVIII. THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 406 
 
 XXIX. THE LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY . . . 422 
 
 XXX. THE LORCHA 'ARROW' . 451 
 
 XXXI. TRANSPORTATION 464 
 
 XXXII. THE SEPOY 473 
 
 XXXIII. THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY or PLASSEY .... 436
 
 A HISTORY 
 
 OK 
 
 OUR OWN TIMES 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE KING IS DEAD ! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN ! 
 
 BKFOUK h;ili'-pa.st two o'clock on the morning of June 20, 1837, William IV. 
 was lying dead in Windsor Ca.stle, while the messengers were already 
 hurrying off to Kensington Palace to bear to his successor her summons 
 to the throne. The illness of the King had been but short, and at one 
 time, even after it had been pronounced alarming, it seemed to take so 
 hopeful a turn that the physicians began to think it would pass harmlessly 
 away. But the King was an old man was an old man even when he 
 came to the throne, and when the dangerous symptoms again exhibited 
 themselves, their warning was very soon followed by fulfilment. The 
 death of King William may be fairly regarded as having closed an era of 
 our history. With him, we may believe, ended the reign of personal 
 government in England. William was indeed a constitutional king in 
 more than mere name. He was to the best of his lights a faithful re- 
 presentative of the constitutional principle. He was as far in advance of 
 his two predecessors in understanding and acceptance of the principle as 
 his successor has proved herself beyond him. Constitutional government 
 has developed itself gradually, as everything else has done in English poli- 
 tics. The written principle and code of its system it would be as vain 
 to look for as for the British Constitution itself. King William still held 
 to and exercised the right to dismiss his ministers when he pleased and 
 because he pleased. His father had held to the right of maintaining 
 favourite ministers in defiance of repeated votes of the House of Commons. 
 It Avould not be easy to find any written rule or declaration of constitu- 
 
 VOL. I. B
 
 2 A HISTORY OF DUE OWN TIMES. en. i. 
 
 tional law pronouncing decisively that either was in the wrong. But in 
 our day we .should believe that the constitutional freedom of England was 
 outraged, or at least put in the extremest danger, if a sovereign were to 
 dismiss a ministry at mete pleasure, or to retain it in despite of the ex- 
 pressed wish of the House of Commons. Virtually, therefore, there was 
 atill personal government in the reign of William IV. With his death the 
 long chapter of its history came to an end. We find it difficult now to 
 believe that it was a living principle, openly at work among us, if not 
 openly acknowledged, so lately as in the reign of King William. 
 
 The closing scenes of King William's life were undoubtedly charac- 
 terised by some personal dignity. As a rule, sovereigns show that they 
 know how tc die. Perhaps the necessary consequence of their training, 
 by virtue of which they come to regard themselves always as the central 
 figures in great state pageantry, is to make them assume a manner of dignity 
 on all occasions when the eyes of their subjects may be supposed to be on 
 them, even if the dignity of bearing is not the free gift of nature. The 
 manners of William IV. had been, like those of most of his brothers, 
 somewhat rough and overbearing. He had been an unmanageable naval 
 officer. lie had again and again disregarded or disobeyed orders, and at 
 last it had been found convenient to withdraw him from active service 
 altogether, and allow him to rise through the sitceessive /anks of his pro- 
 fession by a merely formal and technical process of ascent. In his more 
 private capacity he had, when younger, indulged more than once in un- 
 seemly and insufferable freaks of temper. He had mane himself unpopular 
 while Duke of Clarence by his strenuous opposition to some of the 
 measures which were especially desired by all the enlightenment of 
 the country. He was, for example, a determined opponent of the mea- 
 sures for the abolition of the slave trade. He had wrangled publicly, in 
 open debate, with some of his brothers in the House of Lords ; and words 
 had been interchanged among the royal princes which could not be heard 
 in our day even in the hottest debates of the more turbulent House of 
 Commons. But William seems to have been one of the men whom in- 
 creased responsibility improves. He was far better as a king than as a 
 prince. He proved that he was able at least to understand that first duty 
 of a constitutional sovereign which, to th" last day of his active life, his 
 father, George III., never could be brought to comprehend that the per- 
 sonal predilections and prejudices of the King must sometimes give way 
 to the public interest. 
 
 Nothing perhaps in life became him like to the leaving of it. His 
 closing days were marked by gentle ness and kindly consideration for the 
 feelings of those around him. When he awoke on June 18 he r'jmem-
 
 1837- A 1USTCRY' OF OUR OWN TIMiiS, 3 
 
 bereci that it wa the anniversary o the battle of Waterloo, vie expressed 
 R strong, pathetic wish to live over that day, even if ho were never to see 
 another sunset. He called for the flag which the Duke of Wellington 
 always sent him on that anniversary in homage for Strathfieldsaye, and 
 he laid his hand upon the eagle which adorned it and said he felt revived 
 by the touch. He had himself attended since his accession the Waterloo 
 banquet; but this time the Duke of Wellington thought it would perhaps 
 be more seemly to have the dinner put off, and sent accordingly to take 
 the wishes of his Majesty. The King declared that the dinner must go on 
 as usual, and sent to the Duke a friendly, simple message, expressing his 
 hope that the guests might have a pleasant day. He talked in his homely 
 way to those about him, his direct language seeming to acquire a sort of 
 tragic dignity from the approach of the death that was so near. He had 
 prayers read to him again and again, and called those near him to witness 
 that he had always been a faithful believer in the truths of religion. lie had 
 his despatch-boxes brought to him, and tried to get through some business 
 with his private secretary. It was remarked with some interest that the 
 last official act he ever performed was to sign with his trembling hand the 
 pardon of a condemned criminal. Even a far nobler reign than his would 
 have received new dignity if it closed with a deed of mercy. When some 
 of those around him endeavoured to encourage him with the idea that he 
 might recover and live many years yet, he declared, with a simplicity 
 which had something oddly pathetic in it, that he would be willing to live 
 ten years yet for the sake of the country. The poor King was evidently 
 under the sincere conviction that England could hardly get on without 
 him. His consideration for his country, whatever whimsical thoughts it 
 may suggest, is entitled to some at least of the respect which we give to 
 the dying groan of a Pitt or a Mirabeau, who fears, with too much reason, 
 that he leaves a blank not easily to be filled. ' Young royal tarry- breeks,' 
 William had been jocularly called by Robert Burns fifty years before, 
 when there was yet a popular belief that he would come all right and do 
 brilliant and gallant things, and become a stout sailor in whom a sea- 
 faring nation might feel pride. He disappointed all such expectations; 
 but it must be owned that when responsibility came upon him he disap- 
 pointed expectation anew in a different way, and was a better sovereign, 
 more deserving of the complimentary title of patriot-king, than even his 
 friends would have ventured to anticipate. 
 
 There were eulogies pronounced upon him after his death in both 
 Houses of Parliament as a matter of course. It is not necessary, however, 
 to set down to mere court homage or parliamentary form some of the 
 praises that were bestowed on the dead King by Lord Melbourne and Lord 
 
 B 2
 
 4 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. i 
 
 Brougham and Lord Grey. A certain tone of sincerity, not quite free 
 perhaps from surprise, appears to run through some of these expressions 
 of admiration. They seem to say that the speakers were at one time or 
 another considerably surprised to find that, after all, William really wa? 
 able and willing on grave occasions to subordinate his personal likings and 
 dislikings to considerations of State policy and to what was shown to him 
 to be for the good o the nation. In this sense at least he may be called 
 a patriot-king. We have advanced a good deal since that time, and we 
 require somewhat higher and more positive qualities in a sovereign now 
 to excite our political wonder. But we must judge William by the reigns 
 that went before, and not the reign that came after him ; and, with that 
 consideration borne in mind, we may accept the panegyric of Lord Mel- 
 bourne and of Lord Grey, and admit that on the whole he was better than 
 his education, his early opportunities, and his early promise. 
 
 William IV. (third son of George III.) had left no children who could 
 have succeeded to the throne, and the crown passed therefore to the 
 daughter of his brother (fourth son of George), the Duke of Kent. This 
 was the Princess Alexandrina Victoria, who was born at Kensington 
 Palace on May 24, 1819. The princess was therefore at this time little 
 more than eighteen years of age. The Duke of Kent died a few months 
 lifter the birth of his daughter, and the child was brought up under the 
 care of his widow. She was well brought up : both as regards her 
 intellect and her character her training was excellent. She was taught to 
 be seli'-reliant, brave, and systematical. Prudence and economy were 
 inculcated on her as though she had been born to be poor. One is not 
 generally inclined to attach much importance to what historians tell us of 
 tlie education of contemporary princes or princesses; but it cannot be 
 doubted that the Princess Victoria was trained for intelligence and 
 goodness. 
 
 ' The death of the King of England has everywhere caused the greatest 
 sensation. . . . Cousin Victoria is said to have shown astonishing 
 aclf-possession. She undertakes a heavy responsibility, especially at the 
 present moment, when parties are so excited, and all rest their hopes on 
 her.' These words arc an extract from a letter written on July -1, 1837, 
 by the late Prince Albert, the Prince Consort of so many happy years. 
 The letter was written to the Prince's father, from Bonn. The young 
 Queen had indeed behaved with remarkable self-possession. There is a 
 pretty description, which lias been often quoted, but will bear citing once 
 more, given by Miss Wynn of the manner in which the young sovereign 
 received the news of her accession to a throne. The Archbishop of 
 Hanterbury Dr. ITowley, and the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquis of
 
 !87. A HISTOllY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. ft 
 
 Conyngham, left Windsor for Kensington Palace, where the Princs 
 Victoria had been residing, to inform her of the King's death. It was two 
 hours after midnight when they started, and they did not reach Kensington 
 until five o'clock in the morning. ' They knocked, they rang, they 
 thumped for a considerable time before they could rouse the porter at the 
 gate; they were again kept waiting in the courtyard, then turned into one 
 of the lower rooms, where they seemed forgotten by everybody. They 
 rang the bell, and desired that the attendant of the Princess Victoria 
 might be sent to inform her Royal Highness that they requested an 
 audience on business of importance. Alter another delay, and another 
 ringing to inquire the cause, the attendant was summoned, who stated 
 that the Princess was in such a sweet sleep that she could not venture to 
 disturb her. Then they said, " We are come on business of state to the 
 Queen, and even her sleep must give way to that." It did ; and to prove 
 that she did not keep them waiting, in a few minutes she came into the 
 room in a loose white nightgown and shawl, her nightcap thrown off 1 , and 
 her hair falling upon her shoulders, her feet in slippers, tears in her eyes, 
 but perfectly collected and dignified.' The Prime Minister, Lord Mel- 
 bourne, was presently sent for, and a meeting of the Privy Council 
 summoned for eleven o'clock, when the Lord Chancellor administered the 
 usual oaths to the Queen, and her Majesty received in return the oaths of 
 allegiance of the Cabinet ministers and other privy councillors present. 
 Mr. Greville, who was usually as little disposed to record any enthusiastic 
 admiration of royalty and royal personages as Ilumboldt or Varnhagen 
 von Ense could have been, has described the scene in words well worthy 
 of quotation. 
 
 ' The King died at twenty minutes after two yesterday morning, and 
 the young Queen met the Council at Kensington Palace at eleven. Never 
 was anything like the first impression she produced, or the chorus of 
 praise and admiration which it raised about her manner and behaviour ; 
 and certainly not without justice. It was very extraordinary, and some- 
 thing far beyond what was looked for. Her extreme youth and inexpe- 
 rience, and the ignorance of the world concerning her, naturally excited 
 intense curiosity to see how she would act on this trying occasion, and 
 there was a considerable assemblage at the palace, notwithstanding the 
 short notice which was given. The first thing to be done was to teach 
 her her lesson, which, for this purpose, Melbourne had himself to learn. 
 . . . She bowed to the lords, took her seat, and then read her speech in 
 a clear, distinct, and audible voice, and without any appearance of fear or 
 embarrassment. She was quite plainly dressed, and in innurnil^. Alter 
 she had read her speech, and taken and si<rned the oath for the swcuritv of
 
 6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. i 
 
 the Church of Scotland, the privy councillors were sworn, the two royal 
 dukes first by themselves ; and as these two old men, her uncles, knelt 
 before her, swearing allegiance and kissing her hand, I saw her blush up 
 to the eyes, as if she felt the contrast between their civil and their natural 
 relations, and this was the only sign of emotion which she evinced. Her 
 manner to them was very graceful and engaging ; she kissed them both, 
 and rose from her chair and moved towards the Duke of Sussex, who was 
 farthest from her, and too infirm to reach her. She seemed rather 
 bewildered at the multitude of men who were sworn, and who came, one 
 after anotner, to kiss her hand, but she did not speak to anybody, nor did 
 she make the slightest difference in her manner, or show any in her 
 countenance, to any individual of any rank, station or party. I particularly 
 watched her when Melbourne and the ministers, and the Duke of Welling- 
 ton and Peel approached her. She went through the whole ceremony, 
 occasionally looking at Melbourne for instruction when she had any doubt 
 what to do, which hardly ever occurred, and with perfect calmness and self- 
 possession, but at the same time with a graceful modesty and propriety 
 particularly interesting and ingratiating.' 
 
 Sir Robert Peel told Mr. Greville that he was amazed at ' her manner 
 and behaviour, at her apparent deep sense of her situation, and at the 
 same time her firmness.' The Duke of Wellington said in his blunt way 
 that if she had been his own daughter he could not have desired to see 
 her perform her part better. ' At twelve,' says Mr. Greville, ' she held a 
 Council, at which she presided with as much ease as if she had been doing 
 nothing else all her life ; and though Lord Lansdowne and my colleague 
 had contrived between them to make some confusion with the Council 
 papers, she was not put out by it. She looked very well ; and though so 
 small in stature, and without much pretension to beauty, the gracefulness 
 of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give her on the 
 whole a very agreeable appearance, and with her youth inspire an excessive 
 interest in all who approach her, and which I can't help feeling myself. 
 . . . In short, she appears to act with every sort of good taste and 
 good feeling, as well as good sense ; and as far as it has gone nothing can 
 be more favourable than the impression she has made, and nothing can 
 promise better than her manner and conduct, do ; though,' Mr. (Jreville 
 "omewhat superfluously adds, ' it would be rash to count too confidently 
 upon her judgment and discretion in more weighty matters.' 
 
 Tne interest or curiosity with which the demeanour of the young 
 Queen was watched was all the keener because the world in general knew 
 RO little about her. Not merely was the world in general thus ignorant, 
 but even the statesmen and officials in closest communication with court
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 7 
 
 circles were in almost absolute ignorance. According to Mr. Grcvillo ; 
 whose authority, however, is not to be taken too implicitly except as to 
 matters which he actually saw, the young Queen had been previously 
 kept in such seclusion by her mother ' never,' he says, ' having {slept out 
 of her bedroom, nor been alone with anybody but herself and the Baroness 
 Lehzen ' that ' not one of her acquaintance, none of the attendants at 
 Kensington, not even the Duchess of Northumberland, her governess, have 
 any idea what she is or what she promises to be.' There was enough in 
 the court of the two sovereigns who went before Queen Victoria to justify 
 any strictness of seclusion which the Duchess of Kent might desire for her 
 daughter. George IV. was a Charles II. without the education or the 
 talents ; William IV. was a Frederick William of Prussia without the 
 genius. The ordinary manners of the society at the court of either had 
 a full flavour, to put it in the softest way, such as a decent taproom would 
 hardly exhibit in a time like the present. No one can read even the most 
 favourable descriptions given by contemporaries of the manners of those 
 two courts without feeling grateful to the Duchess of Kent for resolving 
 that her daughter shotild see as little as possible of their ways and their 
 company. 
 
 It was remarked with some interest that the Queen subscribed herself 
 simply Victoria,' and not, as had been expected, ' Alexandrina Victoria.' 
 Mr. Greville mentions in his diary of December 24, 1810, that, 'the Duke 
 of Kent gave the name of Alexandrina to his daughter in compliment to 
 the Emperor of Russia. She was to have had the name of Georgiana, but, 
 the Duke insisted upon Alexandrina being her first name. The Regent 
 sent for Lieven ' (the Russian ambassador, husband of the famous Princess 
 de Licvcn), ' and made him a great many compliments, en le persiftant^ on 
 1 he Emperor's being godfather, but informed him that the name of Georgiana 
 could be second to no other in this country, and therefore she could not 
 bear it at all.' It was a very wise choice to employ simply the name of 
 Victoria, around which no ungenial associations of any kind hung at that 
 time, and which can have only grateful associations in the history of this 
 country for the future. 
 
 It is not necessary to go into any formal description of the various 
 ceremonials and pageantries which celebrated the accession of the now 
 sovereign. The proclamation of the Queen, her appearance lor the first 
 time on the throne in the House of Lords when she prorogued Parliament 
 in person, and even the gorgeous festival of her coronation, which took 
 place on June 28, in the following year, 1838, may be passed over with a 
 mere word of record. It is worth mentioning, however, that at the coro- 
 nation procession one of the most conspicuous figures w;is that of Marshal
 
 g A H1STOK* 0* OUK OWN TIMES. CH . ,. 
 
 Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, the opponent of Moore and Wellington in the 
 Peninsula, the commander of the Old Guard at Llitzen, and one of the 
 strong arms of Napoleon at Waterloo. Soult had been sent as ambassador- 
 extraordinary to represent the French Government and people at the 
 coronation of Queen Victoria, and nothing could exceed the enthusiasm 
 with which he was received by the crowds in the streets of London on that 
 day. The white-haired soldier was cheered wherever a glimpse of his 
 face or figure could be caught. He appeared in the procession in a car- 
 riage, the frame of which had been used on occasions of state by some of 
 the princes of the House of Conde, and which Soult had had splendidly 
 decorated for the ceremony of the coronation. Even the Austrian ambas- 
 sador, says an eyewitness, attracted less attention than Soult, although 
 the dress of the Austrian, Prince Esterhazy, ' down to his very boot heels 
 sparkled with diamonds.' The comparison savours now of the ridiculous, but 
 is remarkably expressive and effective. Prince Esterhazy's name in those 
 days suggested nothing but diamonds. His diamonds may be said to glitter 
 through all the light literature of the time. When Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu wanted a comparison with which to illustrate excessive splen- 
 dour and brightness, she found it in ' Governor Pitt's diamonds.' Prince 
 Esterhazy's served the same purpose for the writers of the early years of the 
 present reign. It was therefore, perhaps, no very poor tribute to the stout old 
 moustache of the Republic and the Empire to say that at a London pageant 
 his war-worn face drew attention away from Prince Esterhazy's diamonds. 
 Soult himself felt very warmly the genuine kindness of the reception given 
 to him. Years after, in a debate in the French Chamber, when M. Guizot 
 was accused of too much partiality for the English alliance, Marshal Soult 
 declared himself a warm champion of that alliance. ' I fought the English 
 down to Toulouse,' he said, ' when I fired the last cannon in defence of the 
 national independence; in the meantime I have been in London, and 
 France knows the reception which I had there. The English themselves 
 cried " Vive Soult ! " they cried, " Soult for ever ! " I had learned to 
 estimate the English on the field of battle; I have learned to estimate them 
 in peace ; and I repeat that I am a warm partisan of the English alliance.' 
 History is not exclusively made by cabinets and professional diplomatists. 
 It is highlv probable that the cheers oC a London crowd on the day of the 
 Queen's coronation did something genuine and substantial to restore the 
 good feeling between this country and Franco, and efface the bitter memo- 
 ries of Waterloo. 
 
 It is a fact well worthy of note amid whatever records of court ceremo- 
 nial and of political change, that a few days after the accession of the 
 Queen, Mr. Montefiore was elected Sheriff of* London, the. first Jew who
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMKS. fl 
 
 had ever been chosen for tliat office; and that ho received knighthood at 
 the hands of her Majesty when she visited the city on the following Lord 
 Mayor's day. He was the first Jew whom royalty had honoured in this 
 country .since the good old times when royalty was pleased to borrow the 
 Jew's money, or order instead the extraction of his teeth. The expansion 
 of the principle of religious liberty and equality which has been one of the 
 most remarkable characteristics of the reign of Queen Victoria, could 
 hardly have been more becomingly inaugurated than by the compliment 
 which sovereign and city paid to Sir Moses Montefiore. 
 
 The first signature attached to the Act of Allegiance presented to the 
 Queen at Kensington Palace was that of her eldest suryiving uncle, Ernest, 
 Duke of Cumberland. The fact may be taken as an excuse for introducing 
 a few words here to record the severance that then took place between the 
 interests of this country, or at least the reigning family of these realms, 
 and another State, which had for a long time been bound up together in a 
 manner seldom satisfactory to the English people. In the whole history of 
 England it will be observed that few things have provoked greater popular 
 dissatisfaction than the connection of a reigning family with the crown or 
 rulership of some foreign State. There is an instinctive jealousy on such 
 a point, which even when it is unreasonable is not unnatural. A sovereign 
 of England had better be sovereign of England, and of no foreign State. 
 Many favourable auspices attended the accession of Queen Victoria to the 
 throne ; some at least of these were associated with her sex. The country 
 was in general disposed to think that the accession of a woman to the 
 throne would somewhat clarify and purify th.3 atmosphere of the Court. 
 It had another good effect as well, and one of a strictly political nature 
 It severed the connection which had existed for some generations between 
 this country and Hanover. The connection was only personal, the succes- 
 sive kings of England being also by succession sovereigns of Hanover. 
 
 The crown of Hanover was limited in its descent to the male line, and 
 it passed on the death of William IV. to his eldest surviving brother, 
 Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. The change was in almost every way 
 satisfactory to the English people. The indirect connection between 
 England and Hanover had at no time been a matter of gratification to the 
 public of this country. Many cooler and more enlightened persons than 
 honest Squire Western had viewed with disfavour, and at one time with 
 distrust, the division of interests which the ownership of the two crowns 
 seemed almost of necessity to create in our English sovereigns. Besides, 
 it must be owned that the people of this country were not by any means 
 sorry to be rid of tin 1 Duke of Cumberland. Not many of George lll.s 
 sons were popular ; the Duke of Cumberland was probably the least popular
 
 10 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. i. 
 
 of all. He was believed by many persons to have had something more 
 ihan an indirect, or passive, or innocent share in the Orange plot, dis- 
 covered and exposed by Joseph Hume in 1835, for setting aside the claims 
 of the young Princess Victoria and putting himself, the Duke of Cumber- 
 land, on the throne; a scheme which its authors pretended to justify by 
 the preposterous assertion that they feared the Duke of Wellington world 
 otherwise seize the crown for himself. His manners were rude, over- 
 bearing, and sometimes even brutal. He had personal habits which seemed 
 rather fitted for the days of Tiberius, or for the court of Peter the Great, 
 than for the time and sphere to which he belonged. Humour not unnatu- 
 rally exaggerated his defects, and in the mouths of many his name was 
 the symbol of the darkest and fiercest passions, and even crimes. Some 
 of the popular reports with regard to him had their foundation only in the 
 common detestation of his character and dread of his influence. But it is 
 certain that he was profligate, selfish, overbearing and quarrelsome. A 
 man with these qualities would usually be described in fiction as, at all 
 events, bluntly honest and outspoken ; but the Duke of Cumberland was 
 deceitful and treacherous. He was outspoken in his abuse of those with 
 whom he quarrelled, and in his style of anecdote and jocular conversation ; 
 but in no other sense. The Duke of Wellington, whom he hated, told Mr. 
 Greville that he once asked George IV. why the Duke of Cumberland was 
 so unpopular, and the King replied, ' Because there never was a father well 
 with his son, or husband with his wife, or lover with his mistress, or 
 friend with his friend, that he did not try to make mischief between them.' 
 The first thing he did on his accession to the throne of Hanover was to 
 abrogate the constitution which had been agreed to by the Estates of the 
 kingdom, and sanctioned by the late King, William IV. 'Radicalism,' 
 said the King, writing to an English nobleman, ' has been here all the 
 order of the day, and all the lower class appointed to office were more or 
 less imbued with these laudable principles. . . . But 1 have cut the 
 wings of this democracy.' He went indeed pretty vigorously to work, for 
 he dismissed from their offices seven of the most distinguished professors 
 of the University 01" Gottingen, because they signed a protest against his 
 arbitrary abrogation of the constitution. Among the men thus pushed 
 from their stools were Gervinus, the celebrated historian and Shake- 
 spearian crili :, at that time professor of history and literature; Ewald, the 
 orientalist aiul theologian ; Jacob Grimm ; and Frederick Dahlmann, pro- 
 fessor of political science. Gervinus, Grimm and Dahlmann we're not 
 merely deprived of their offices, but were actually sent into exile. The 
 exiles were accompanied across the frontier by an immense concourse of 
 students, who gave them a triumphant, Gelcit in true student fashion, and
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. I 1 
 
 converted what was meant lor degradation and punishment into a proces- 
 sion of honour. The offence against all rational principles o civil govern- 
 ment in these arbitrary proceedings on the part of the new King was the 
 more flagrant because it could not even be pretended that the professors 
 were interfering with political matters outside their province, or that they 
 were issuing manifestoes calculated to disturb the public peace. The 
 University of Gottingen at that time sent a representative to the Estates of 
 the kingdom, and the protest to which the seven professors attached their 
 names was addressed to the academical senate, and simply declared that 
 they would take no part in the ensuing election, because of the suspension 
 of the constitution. All this led to somewhat serious disturbances in 
 Hanover, which it needed the employment of military force to suppress. 
 
 It was felt in England that the mere departure of the Duke of Cumber- 
 land from this country would have made the severance of the connection 
 with Hanover desirable, even if it had not been in other ways an advantage 
 to us. Later times have shown how much we have gained by the separa- 
 tion. It would have been exceedingly inconvenient, to say the least, if 
 the crown worn by a sovereign of England had been hazarded in the war 
 betsveen Austria and Prussia in 1866. Our reigning family must have 
 seemed to suffer in dignity, if that crown had been roughly knocked off 
 the head of its wearer who happened to be an English sovereign ; and it 
 would have been absurd to expect that the English people could engage 
 in a quarrel with which their interests and honour had absolutely nothing 
 to do, for the sake of a mere family possession of their ruling house. 
 
 Looking back from this distance of time and across a change of political 
 and social manners far greater than the distance of time might seem to 
 explain, it appears difficult to understand the passionate emotions which 
 the accession of the young Queen seems to have excited on all sides. Some 
 influential and prominent politicians talked and wrote as if there were really 
 a possibility of the Tories attempting a revolution in favour of the Hano- 
 verian branch of the royal family ; as if some such crisis had again come 
 round as that which tried the nation when Queen Anne died. On tlv 
 other hand, there were heard loud and shrill cries that the Queen \\x. 
 destined to be conducted by her constitutional advisers into a precipitate 
 pathway leading sheer down into popery and anarchy. The Times insisted 
 that ' the anticipations of certain Irish Koman Catholics respecting the 
 success of their warfare against Church and State under the auspices of 
 these not untried ministers into whose hands the all but infant Queen has 
 been compelled by her unhappy condition to deliver herself and her indig- 
 nant people are to be taken for nothing, and as nothing, but the chimeras 
 of a band of visionary traitors.' The Tinu's even thought it necessary to
 
 1 2 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. i 
 
 point out that for her Majesty to turn papist, to marry a papist, ' or in any 
 manner follow the footsteps of the Coburg family whom these incendiaries 
 describe as papists,' would involve an ' immediate forfeiture of the British 
 crown.' On the other hand, some of the Radical, and more especially Irish 
 papers talked in the plainest terms of Tory plots to depose or even to 
 assassinate the Queen and put the Duke of Cumberland in her piacr. 
 O'Counell, the great Irish agitator, declared in a public speech that if it 
 were necessary he could get ' five hundred thousand brave Irishmen to 
 defend the life, the honour, and the person of the beloved young lady by 
 whom England's throne is now filled.' Mr. Henry Grattan, the son of the 
 famous orator, and like his father a Protestant, declared at a meeting in 
 Dublin, that 'if her Majesty were once fairly placed in the hands of the 
 Tories, I would not give an orange peel for her life.' He even went on to 
 put his rhetorical declaration into a more distinct form : ' If some of the 
 low miscreants of the party got round her Majesty and had the mixing of 
 the royal bowl at night, I fear she would have a long sleep.' This language 
 seems almost too absurd for sober record, and yet was hardly more absurd 
 than many things said on what may be called the other side. A Mr. Brad- 
 shaw, Tory member for Canterbury, declared at a public meeting in that 
 ancient city that the sheet-anchor of the Liberal Ministry Avas the body of 
 ' Irish papists and rapparees whom the priests return to the House of Com- 
 mons.' ' These are the men Avho represent the bigoted savages, hardly 
 more civilised than the natives of New Zealand, but animated Avith a fierce, 
 undying hatred of England. Yet on these men are bestowed the counte- 
 nance and support of the Queen of Protestant England. For, alas ! her 
 Majesty is Queen only of a faction, and is as much of a partisan as the Lord 
 Chancellor himself.' At a Conservative dinner in Lancashire, a speaker 
 denounced the Queen and her ministers on the same ground so vehemently, 
 that the Commander-in-Chief addressed a remonstrance to some military 
 officers who Avere among the guests at this excited banquet, pointing out 
 to them the serious responsibility they incurred by remaining in any 
 assembly Avhen such language Avas uttered and such sentiments were 
 expressed. 
 
 No one, of course, Avould take impassioned and inflated harangues of 
 this kind on either side as a representation of the general feeling. Sober 
 persons all over the country must luiA'e knoAvn perfectly Avell that there 
 was not the slightest fear that the young Queen would turn a Roman 
 Catholic, or that her Ministry intended to deliver the country up as a prey 
 to Rome. Sober persons everywhere, too, must have knoAvn equally Avell 
 that there was no longer the slightest cause to feel any alarm about a Tory 
 plot to hand over the throne of England to the detested Duke of Cumber-
 
 1837. A HISTORY 01' OUR OWN Tl.MKS. 13 
 
 land. We only desire in quoting such outrageous declarations to make 
 more clear the condition of tho public mind, and to show what the state 
 of the political world must have been when such extragavance and such 
 delusions were possible. We have done this partly to show what were the 
 trials and difficulties under which her Majesty eame to the throne, and 
 partly for the mere purpose of illustrating the condition of tho country 
 and of political education. There can be no doubt that all over the coun- 
 try passion and ignorance were at work to make the task of constitutional 
 government peculiarly difficult. A vast number of the followers of the 
 Tories in country places really believed that the Liberals were determined 
 to hurry the Sovereign into some policy tending to the degradation of the 
 monarchy. If any cool and enlightened rcasoner were to argue with them 
 on this point and endeavour to convince them of the folly o ascribing 
 such purposes to a number of English statesmen, whose interests, position, 
 and honour were absolutely bound up with the success and the glory ol 
 the State, the indignant and unreasoning Tories would be able to cite the 
 very words of so great and so sober-minded a statesman as Sir Kobert Peel, 
 who in his famous speech to the electors of Tamworth promised to rescue 
 the Constitution from being made the ' victim of false friends,' and the 
 country from being ' trampled under the hoof of a ruthless democracy.' 
 If, on the other hand, a sensible person were to try to persuade hot-headed 
 people on the opposite side that it was absurd to suppose the Tories really 
 meant any harm to the freedom and the peace of the country and the 
 security of the succession, he might be invited with significant expression 
 to read the manifesto issued by Lord Durham to the electors of Sunder- 
 land, in which that eminent statesman declared that 'in all circumstances, 
 at all hazards, be the personal consequences what they may,' he would 
 ever be found ready when called upon to defend the principles on which 
 the constitution of the country was then settled. We know now very well 
 that Sir Robert Peel and Lord Durham were using the language of innocent 
 metaphor. Sir Robert Peel did not really fear much the hoof of the ruth- 
 less democracy ; Lord Durham did not actually expect to be called upon 
 at any terrible risk to himself to fight the battle of freedom on English 
 soil. But when those whose minds had been bewildered and whose pas- 
 sions had been inflamed by the language of the Times on the one side, and 
 that of O'Connell on the other, came to read the calmer and yet sufficiently 
 impassioned words of responsible statesmen like Sir Kobert Peel and Lord 
 Durham, they might be excused if they found rather a confirmation than 
 a refutation of their arguments and their fears. 
 
 The truth is, that the country was in a very excited condition, and 
 that it is easy to imagine a succession of events which might in a moment
 
 14 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. u 
 
 Uave thrown it into utter confusion. At home and abroad things were 
 Poking ominous for the new reign. To begin with, the last two reigns 
 bad, on the whole, done much to loosen not only the personal feeling of 
 allegiance, but even the general confidence in the virtue of monarchical 
 rule. The old plan of personal government had become an anomaly, and the 
 system of a genuine constitutional government, such as we know, had not 
 yet been tried. The very manner in which the Reform Bill had been carried, 
 the political stratagem which had been resorted to when further resistance 
 seemed dangerous, was not likely to exalt in popular estimate the value of 
 what was then gracefully called constitutional government. Only a short 
 time before the country had seen Catholic Emancipation conceded, not 
 from a sense of justice on the part of ministers, but avowedly because 
 further resistance must lead to civil disturbance. There was not much in 
 all this to impress an intelligent and independent people with a sense of 
 the great wisdom of the rulers of the country, or of the indispensable ad- 
 vantages of the system which they represented. Social discontent prevailed 
 almost everywhere. Economic laws were hardly understood by the country 
 in general. Class interests were fiercely arrayed against each other. The 
 cause of each man's class filled him with a positive fanaticism. He was 
 Dot a mere selfish and grasping partisan, but he sincerely believed that 
 each other class was arrayed against his, and that the natural duty of self- 
 defence and self-preservation compelled him to stand firmly by his own. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 
 
 LOUD MELBOURNE was the First Minister of the Crown when the Queen 
 succeeded to the throne. He was a man who then and always after made 
 himself particularly dear to the Queen, and for whom she had the strongest 
 regard. He was of kindly, somewhat indolent nature; fair and even 
 generous towards his political opponents ; of the most genial disposition 
 towards his friends. He was emphatically not a strong man. He was not 
 a man to make good grow where it was not already growing, to adopt the 
 expression of a great author. Long before that time his eccentric wife, 
 Lady Caroline Lamb, had excused herself for some of her follies and frail- 
 ties by pleading that her husband was not a man to watch over anyone's 
 morals. He was a kindly counsellor to a young Queen; and, happily for 
 herself, the young Queen in this case had strong clear sense enough of hei
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 1.1 
 
 own not to be absolutely dependent on any counsel. Lord Melbourne was 
 not a statesman. His best qualities, personal kindness and good nature 
 apart, were purely negative. lie was unfortunately not eontent even with 
 the reputation for a sort of indolent good nature which he might have well 
 deserved. He strove to make himself appear hopelessly idle, trivial, and 
 careless. When lie really was serious and earnest he seemed to make it 
 his business to look like one in whom no human af lairs could call up a gleam 
 o interest. He became tlnefanfaron of levities which he never had. We 
 have amusing pictures of him as he occupied himself in blowing a feather 
 or nursing a sola-cushion while receiving an important and perhaps highly 
 sensitive deputation from this or that commercial ' interest.' Those who 
 knew him insisted that he really was listening with all his might and 
 main ; that he had sat up the whole night before, studying the question 
 which he seemed to think so unworthy of any attention; and that so far 
 from being, like Horace, wholly absorbed in his trifles, he was at very 
 great pains to keep up the appearance of a triller. A. brilliant critic has 
 made a lively and amusing attack on this alleged peculiarity. ' If the 
 truth must be told,' says Sydney Smith, our viscount is somewhat of an 
 impostor. Everything about him seems to betoken careless desolation ; 
 any one would suppose from his manner that he was playing at chuck- 
 farthing with human happiness; that he was always on the heel of pastime; 
 that he would giggle away the Great Charter, and decide by the method 
 of teetotum whether my lords the bishops should or should not retain their 
 seats in the House of Lords. All this is but the mere vanity of surprising, 
 and making iis believe that he can play with kingdoms as other men cmi 
 with ninepins. ... I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings, and to brush 
 away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared ; but I 
 accuse our minister of honesty and diligence ; I deny that he is careless or 
 rash : he is nothing more than a man of good understanding and good 
 principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a 
 political roue.' 
 
 Such a masquerading might perhaps have been excusable, or even at- 
 tractive, in the case of a man of really brilliant and commanding talents. 
 Lookers-on are always rather apt to be fascinated by the spectacle of a 
 man of well-recognised strength and force of character playing i'cr the 
 moment the part of an indolent triller. The contrast is charming in a 
 brilliant Prince Hal or such a Sardanapalus as Byron drew. In our own 
 time a considerable amount of the popularity of Lord Palmerston was in- 
 spired by the amusing antagonism between his assumed levity and his 
 well-known force of intellect and strength of will. But in Lord Mel- 
 bourne's case the affectation had no such excuse or happy effect. Hewap
 
 16 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CK. u 
 
 not by uuy means a Palmerston. He was only fitted to rule in the 
 quietest times. He was a poor speaker, utterly unable to encounter the 
 keen penetrating criticisms of Lyndhurst or the vehement and remorseless 
 invectives of Brougham. Debates were then conducted with a bitterness 
 of personality unknown, or at all events very rarely known, in our days. 
 Even in the House of Lords language was often interchanged of the most 
 virulent hostility. The rushing impetuosity and fury of Brougham's 
 style had done much then to inflame the atmosphere which in our days is 
 usually so cool and moderate. 
 
 It probably added to the warmth of the attacks on the Ministry of 
 Lord Melbourne that the Prime Minister was supposed to be an especial 
 favourite with the young Queen. When Victoria came to the throne the 
 Duke of Wellington gave frank expression to his feelings as to the future 
 of his party. He was of opinion that the Tories would never have any 
 chance with a young woman for sovereign. ' I have no small talk,' he 
 said, ' and Peel has no manners.' It had probably not occurred to the 
 Duke of Wellington to think that a woman could be capable of as sound a 
 constitutional policy and could show as little regard for personal predilec- 
 tions in the business of government as any man. All this, however, only 
 tended to embitter the feeling against the Whig Government. Lord 
 Melbourne's constant attendance on the young Queen was regarded with 
 keen jealousy and dissatisfaction. According to some critics the Prime 
 Minister was endeavouring to inspire her with all his own gay heedlessness 
 of character and temperament. According to others, Lord Melbourne's 
 purpose was to make himself agreeable and indispensable to the Queen ; 
 to surround her with his friends, relations and creatures, and thus to get a 
 lifelong hold of power in England, in defiance of political changes and 
 parties. It is curious now to look back on much that was said in the poli- 
 tical and personal heats and bitternesses of the time. If Lord Melbourne 
 had been a French mayor of the palace, whose real object was to make 
 himself virtual ruler of the State and to hold the Sovereign as a puppet in 
 his hands, there could not have been greater anger, fear and jealousy. 
 Since that time we have all learned on the very best authority that Lord 
 Melbourne actually was himself the person to advise the Queen to show 
 some confidence in the Tories to ' hold out the olive branch a little to 
 them,' as he expressed it. He does not appear to have been greedy of 
 power, or to have used any unfair means of getting or keeping it. The 
 character of the young Sovereign seems to have impressed him deeply. 
 Hia real or affected levity gave way to a genuine and lasting desire to 
 make her life as happy and her reign as successful as he could. The 
 Queen always felt the warmest affection and gratitude for him, and showed
 
 1887. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 1? 
 
 it long after the public had given up the suspicion that she could be a 
 puppet in the hands of a minister. 
 
 Still, it is certain that the Queen's Prime Minister was by no means a 
 popular man at the time of her accession. Even observers who had no 
 political or personal interest whatever in the condition of cabinets were 
 displeased to see the opening of the new reign so much to all appearance 
 under the influence of one who either was or tried to be a mere lounger. 
 The deputations went away offended arid disgusted when Lord Melbourne 
 played with feathers or dandled sofa-cushions in their presence. The 
 almost fierce energy and strenuousness of a man like Brougham showed in 
 overwhelming contrast to the happy-go-lucky airs and graces of the 
 Premier. It is likely that there was quite as much of affectation in the 
 one case as in the other ; but the affectation of a devouring zeal for the 
 public service told at least far better than the other in the heat and stress 
 of debate. "When the new reign began, the Ministry had two enemies or 
 critics in the House of Lords of the most formidable character. Either 
 alone would have been a trouble to a minister of far stronger mould than 
 Lord Melbourne ; but circumstances threw them both for the moment 
 into a chance alliance against him. 
 
 One of these was Lord Brougham. No stronger and stranger a figure 
 than his is described in the modern history of England. He was gifted 
 with the most varied, and striking talents, and with a capacity for labour 
 which sometimes seemed almost superhuman. Not merely had he the 
 capacity for labour, but he appeared to have a positive passion for work. 
 His restless energy seemed as if it must stretch itself out on every side 
 ceeking new fields of conquest. The study that was enough to occupy 
 the whole time and wear out the frame of other men was only recreation 
 to him. He might have been described as one possessed by a very demon 
 of work. His physical strength never gave way. I lis high spirits never 
 deserted him. His self-confidence was boundless. He thought he knew 
 everything and could do everything better than any other man. He 
 delighted in giving evidence that he understood the business of the special- 
 ist better than the specialist himself. His vanity was overweening, and 
 made him ridiculous almost as often and as much as his genius made him 
 admired. The comic literature of more than a generation had no subject 
 more fruitful than the vanity and restlessness of Lord Brougham. He 
 was beyond doubt a great Parliamentary orator. His style was too diffuse 
 and sometimes too uncouth to suit a day like our own, when form counts 
 for more than substance, when passion seems out of place in debate, and 
 not to exaggerate is far more the object than to try to be great. Brough- 
 
 VOL. I. C
 
 18 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. n 
 
 am's action was wild, and sometimes even furious ; his gestures were 
 singularly ungraceful ; his manners were grotesque ; but of his power 
 over his hearers there could be no doubt. That power remained with 
 him until a far later date ; and long after the years when men usually 
 continue to take part in political debate, Lord Brougham could be impas- 
 sioned, impressive, and even overwhelming. He was not an orator of the 
 highest class : his speeches have not stood the test of time. Apart from 
 the circumstances of the hour and the personal power of the speaker, they 
 could hardly arouse any great delight, or even interest ; for they are by 
 no means models of English style, and they have little of that profound 
 philosophical interest, that pregnancy of thought and meaning, and that 
 splendour of eloquence, which make the speeches of Burke always classic, 
 and even in a certain sense always popular among us. In truth no man 
 could have done with abiding success all the things which Brougham did 
 successfully for the hour. On law, on politics, on literature, on languages, 
 nn science, on art, on industrial and commercial enterprise, he professed to 
 pronounce with the authority of a teacher. ' If Brougham knew a little 
 of law,' said O'Connell when the former became Lord Chancellor, ' he 
 would know a little of everything.' The anecdote is told in another way 
 too, which perhaps make? it even more piquant. ' The new Lord Chan- 
 cellor knows a little of everything in the world even of law.' 
 
 Brougham's was an excitable and self-asserting nature. He had 
 during many years shown himself an embodied influence, a living speak- 
 ing force in the promotion of great political and social reforms. If his 
 talents were great, if his personal vanity was immense, let it be said that 
 his services to the cause of human freedom and education were simply 
 inestimable. As an opponent of slavery in the colonies, as an advocate oi 
 political reform at home, of law reform, of popular education, of religious 
 equality, he had worked with indomitable zeal, with resistless passion, 
 and with splendid success. But his career passed through two remarkable 
 changes which to a great extent interfered with the full efficacy of his 
 extraordinary powers. The first was when from popular tribune and 
 reformer he became Lord Chancellor in 1830 ; the second was when ho 
 was left out of office on the reconstruction of the Whig Ministry in April 
 1835, and he passed for the remainder of his life into the position of an 
 independent or unattached critic of the measures and policy of other men. 
 It has never been clearly known why the Whigs so suddenly through over 
 Brougham. The common belief is that his eccentricities and his almost 
 savage temper made him intolerable in a cabinet. It has been darkly 
 hinted that for a while his intellect was actually under a cloud, as people 
 naid that of Chatham was during a momentous season.
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUll OWN TIMKS. 1" 
 
 Lord Brougham was not a man likely to forget or forgive the wrong 
 tvhich he must have believed that he had sustained at the hands of the 
 Whigs. lie became the fiercest and most formidable of Lord Melbourne's 
 hostile critics. 
 
 The other opponent who has been spoken of was Lord Lyndhurst. 
 Lord Lyndhurst resembled Lord Brougham in the length of his career and 
 in capacity for work, if in nothing else. Lyndhurst, who was born in 
 Boston the year before the tea ships were boarded in that harbour and 
 their cargoes flung into the water, has been heard addressing the House of 
 Lords in all vigour and fluency by men who are yet far from middle age. 
 He was one of the most effective Parliamentary debaters of a time which 
 has known such men as Peel and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, 
 Bright and Cobden. His style was singularly and even severely clear, 
 direct and pure ; his manner was easy and graceful ; his voice remarkably 
 sweet and strong. Nothing could have been in greater contrast than his 
 clear, correct, nervous argument, and the impassioned invectives and over- 
 whelming strength of Brougham. Lyndhurst had, as has been said, an 
 immense capacity for work, when the work had to be done ; but his 
 natural tendency was as distinctly towards indolence as Brougham's was 
 towards unresting activity. Nor were Lyndhurst's political convictions 
 ever very clear. By the habitude of associating with the Tories, and 
 receiving oilice from them, and speaking for them, and attacking their 
 enemies with argument and sarcasm, Lyndhurst finally settled down into 
 all the ways of Toryism. But nothing in his varied history showed that 
 he had any particular preference that way ; and there were many passages 
 in his career when it would seem as if a turn of chance decided what path 
 of political life he was to follow. As a keen debater he was perhaps hardly 
 ever excelled in Parliament ; but he had neither the passion nor the 
 genius of the orator ; and his capacity was narrow indeed in its range when 
 compared with the astonishing versatility and omnivorous mental activity of 
 Brougham. As a speaker he was always equal. He seemed to know no 
 varying moods or fits of mental lassitude. Whenever he spoke he reached 
 at once the same high level as a debater. The very fact may in itself 
 perhaps be taken as conclusive evidence that he was not an orator. The 
 higher qualities of the orator arc no more to be summoned at will than 
 those of the poet. 
 
 These two men were without any comparison the two leading debaters 
 in the House of Lords. Lord Melbourne had not at that time in the 
 Upper House a single man of first class or even of second class debating 
 power on the bench of the Ministry. An able writer has well re/narked 
 that the position of the Ministry in the House of Lords might be compared 
 
 c 2
 
 20 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. n. 
 
 to that of a water-logged wreck into which enemies from all quarters arc 
 pouring their broadsides. 
 
 The accession of the Queen made it necessary that a new Parliament 
 should be summoned. The struggle between parties among the con- 
 stituencies was very animated, and was carried on in some instances with 
 a recourse to manoeuvre and stratagem such as in our time would 
 hardly be possible. The result was not a very marked alteration in the 
 condition of parties ; but on the whole the advantage remained with the 
 Tories. Somewhere about this time, it may be remarked, the use of 
 the word ' Conservative ' to describe the latter political party first came 
 jnto fashion. Mr. Wilson Croker is credited with the honour of having 
 first employed the word in that sense. In an article in the ' Quarterly 
 Review,' some years before, he spoke of being decidedly and conscien- 
 tiously attached ' to what is culled the Tory, but which might with more 
 propriety be called the Conservative party.' During the elections for the 
 new Parliament, Lord John Russell, speaking at a public dinner at 
 Stroud, made allusion to the new name which his opponents were 
 beginning to affect for their party. ' If that,' he said, ' is the name that 
 pleases them ; if they say that the old distinction of Whig and Tory should 
 no longer be kept up, I arn ready, in opposition to their name of 
 Conservative, to take the name of Reformer, and to stand by that 
 opposition.' 
 
 The Tories or Conservatives, then, had a slight gain as the result 
 of the appeal to the country. The new Parliament on its assembling 
 seems to have gathered in the Commons an unusually large number of 
 gifted and promising men. There was something too of a literary stamp 
 about it, a fact not much to be observed in Parliaments of a date nearer to 
 the present time. Mr. Grote, the historian of Greece, sat for the City of 
 London. The late Lord Lytton, then Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer, had a 
 seat, an advanced Radical at that day. Mr. Disraeli came then into Parlia- 
 ment for the first time. Charles Buller, full of high spirits, brilliant humour, 
 and the very inspiration of keen good sense, seemed on the sure way to 
 that career of renown which a premature death cut short. Sir William 
 Molesworth was an excellent type of the school which in later days was 
 called the Philosophical Radical. Another distinguished member of the 
 same school, Mr. Roebuck, had lost his seat, and was for the moment an 
 outsider. Mr. Gladstone had been already five years in Parliament. The 
 late Lord Carlisle, then Lord Morpcth, was looked upon as a graceful 
 specimen of the literary and artistic young nobleman who also cultivates 
 a little politics for his intellectual amusement. Lord John Russell hatj 
 but lately begun his career as loader of the House of Commons, Lord
 
 1S37. A HISTORY OF OUii OWN TIMES. 21 
 
 Palnierston was Foreign Secretary, but had not even then got the credit 
 of the great ability which he possessed. Not many years before Mr, 
 Greville spoke of him as a man who 'had been twenty years in office and had 
 never distinguished himself before.' Mr. Grevillc expressesa mild surprise 
 at the high opinion which persons who knew Lord Palmcrston intimately 
 were pleased to entertain as to his ability and his capacity for work. Only 
 those who knew him very intimately indeed had any idea of the capacity 
 for governing Parliament and the country which he was soon afterwards 
 to display. Sir Kobert Peel was lender of the Conservative party. Lord 
 Stanley, the late Lord Derby, was still in the House of Commons. He 
 had not long before broken definitively with the Whigs on the question of 
 the Irish ecclesiastical establishment, and had passed over to that Conser- 
 vative party of which he afterwards became the most influential leader 
 and the most powerful parliamentary orator. O'Connell and Sheil repre- 
 sented the eloquence of the Irish national party. Decidedly the. House of 
 Commons first elected during Queen Victoria's reign was strong in elo- 
 imence and talent. Only two really great speakers have arisen in the 
 forty years that followed who were not members of Parliament at tha. 
 time, Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. Mr. Cobden had come forward as a 
 candidate for the borough of Stockport, but was not successful, and did 
 not obtain a seat in Parliament until four years after. It was only by what 
 may be called an accident that Macaulay and Mr. Roebuck were not in 
 the Parliament of 1837. It is fair to say, therefore, that, except for 
 Cobden and Bright, the subsequent forty years have added no first class 
 name to the records of Parliamentary eloquence. 
 
 The Ministry was not very strong in the House of Commons. Its 
 conditions indeed hardly allowed it to feel itself strong even if it had had 
 more powerful representatives in cither house. Its adherents were but 
 loosely held together. The more ardent reformers were disappointed with 
 ministers; the Free Trade movement was rising into distinct bulk and 
 proportions, arid threatened to be formidably independent of mere party 
 ties. The Government had to rely a good deal on the precarious support 
 of Mr. O'Connell and his followers. They were not rich in debating 
 talent in the Commons any more than in the Lords. Sir Robert Peel, the 
 leader of the opposition, was by far the most powerful man in the House 
 of Commons. Added to his great qualities as an administrator and a 
 Parliamentary debater, he had the virtue, then very rare among Conserva- 
 tive statesmen, of being a sound and clear financier, with a good grasp of 
 the fundamental principles of political economy. His high, austere 
 character made him respected by opponents as well as by friends. He 
 had not perhaps many intimate friends. His temperament was cold, or at
 
 22 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. n. 
 
 least its heat was self-contained ; he threw out no genial glow to those 
 around him. He was by nature a reserved and shy man, in whose 
 manners shyness took the form of pompousness and coldness. Something 
 might be said of him like that which Richter said of Schiller - he was to 
 strangers stony and like a precipice from which it was tLeir instinct to 
 spring back. It is certain that he had warm and generous feelings, but 
 his very sensitiveness only led him to disguise them. The contrast 
 between his emotions and his lack of demonstrativeness created in him a 
 constant artificiality which often seemed mere awkwardness. It was in 
 the House of Commons that his real genius and character displayed them- 
 selves. The atmosphere of debate was to him what Macaulay says wine 
 was to Addison, the influence which broke the spell under which his fine 
 intellect seemed otherwise to lie imprisoned. Peel was a perfect master 
 of the House of Commons, lie was as great an orator as any man could 
 be who addresses himself to the House of Commons, its ways and its pur- 
 poses alone. He went as near perhaps to the rank of a great orator as 
 anyone can go who is but little gifted with imagination. Oratory has 
 been well described as the fusion of reason and passion. Passion always 
 carries something of the imaginative along with it. Sir Eobert Peel had 
 little imagination, and almost none of that passion which in eloquence 
 sometimes supplies its place. His style was clear, strong, and stately ; 
 full of various argument and apt illustration drawn from books and from 
 the world of politics and commerce. He followed a difficult argument 
 home to its utter conclusions ; and if it had in it any lurking fallacy, he 
 brought out the weakness into the clearest light, often with a happy touch 
 of humour and quiet sarcasm. His speeches might be described as the 
 very perfection of good sense and high principle clothed in the most im- 
 pressive language. But they were something more peculiar than this, for 
 they were so constructed, in their argument and their style alike, as to 
 touch the very core of the intelligence of the House of Commons. They 
 told of the feelings and the inspiration of Parliament as the ballad-music 
 of a country tells of its scenery and its national sentiments. 
 
 Lord Stanley was a far more energetic and impassioned speaker than 
 Sir Robert Peel, and perhaps occasionally, in his later career, came now 
 and then nearer to the height of genuine oratory. But Lord Stanley was 
 little more than a splendid Parliamentary partisan, even when, long after, 
 he was Prime Minister of England. He had ve-iy Mtle indeed of that 
 class o information which the modern world requires of its statesmen and 
 leaders. Of political economy, t.f finance, of the development and tin; 
 discoveries of modern science, he knew almost as little as it is possible for 
 tn able an 1 energetic man to know who lives in the throng of active life
 
 1837- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 23 
 
 and hears what people are talking of around him. Ifc once said good- 
 humouredly of himself, that he was brought up in the pre-scientilic 
 period. His scholarship was merely such training in the classic languages 
 as allowed him to have a full literary appreciation of the beauty of Greek 
 and Roman literature. He had no real and deep knowledge of the history 
 of the Greek and the Roman people, nor probably did he at all appreciate* 
 the great difference between the spirit of Roman and of Greek civilization. 
 He had, in fact, what would have been called at an earlier day an elegant 
 scholarship; he had a considerable knowledge of the politics of his time in. 
 most European countries, an energetic intrepid spirit, arid with him, as 
 Maeaulay well said, the science of Parliamentary debate seemed to be an 
 instinct. There was no speaker on the ministerial benches at that time 
 who could for a moment be compared with him. 
 
 Lord John Russell, who had the leadership of the party in the House 
 of Commons, was really a much stronger man than he seemed to be. He 
 had a character for dauntless courage and confidence among his friends: 
 for boundless self-conceit among his enemies. Everyone remembers 
 Sydney Smith's famous illustrations of Lord John Russell's unlimited 
 faith in his own power of achievement. Thomas Moore addressed a poem 
 to him at one time, when Lord John Russell thought or talked of giving 
 up political life, in which he appeals to 'thy genius, thy youth, and thy 
 name,' declares that the instinct of the young statesman is the same as 
 ' the eaglet's to soar with his eyes on the sun,' and implores him not to 
 ' think for an instant thy country can spare such a light from her darken- 
 ing horizon as thou.' Later observers, to whom Lord John Russell 
 appeared probably remarkable for a cold and formal style as a debater, and 
 for lack of originating power as a statesman, may find it difficult ;?o recon- 
 cile the poet's picture with their own impressions of the reality. But it is 
 certain that at wiic time the reputation of Lord John Russell was that of a 
 rather reckless man of genius, a sort of Whig Shelley. He had in truth 
 much less geniris than his friends and admirers believed, and a great deal 
 more of practical strength than either friends or foes gave him credit for. 
 lie. became, not indeed an orator, but a very keen debater, who was 
 especially effective in a cold irritating sarcasm which penetrated the weak- 
 ness of an opponent's argument like some dissolving acid. In the poem 
 from which we have quoted, Moore speaks of the eloquence of his noble 
 friend as ' not like those rills from a height, which sparkle and foam and in 
 vapour are o'er ; but a current that works out its way into light through 
 the filtering recesses of thought and of lore.' Allowing for the exaggeration 
 of friendship and poetry, this is not a bad description of what Lord John 
 Russell's style became at its best. The thin bright stream of argument
 
 24 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. n. 
 
 worked its way slowly out and contrived to wear a path for itself through 
 obstacles which at first the looker-on might have felt assured it never 
 could penetrate. Lord John Russell's swordsmanship was the swordsman- 
 ship of Saladin, and not that of stout King Richard. But it was very 
 effective sword-play in its own way. 
 
 Our English system of government by party makes the history of 
 Parliament seem like that of a succession of great political duels. Two 
 men stand constantly confronted during a series of years, one of whom is 
 at the head of the Government, while the other is at the head of the Oppo- 
 sition. They change places with each victory. The conqueror goes into 
 office; the conquered into opposition. This is not the place to discuss 
 either the merits or the probable duration of the principle of government 
 by party ; it is enough to say here that it undoubtedly gives a very ani- 
 mated and varied complexion to our political troubles, and invests them 
 indeed with much of the glow and passion of actual warfare. It has often 
 happened that the two leading opponents are men of intellectual and ora- 
 torical powers so fairly balanced that their followers may well dispute 
 among themselves as to the superiority of their respective chiefs, and that 
 the public in general may become divided into two schools not merely 
 political, but even critical, according to their partiality for one or the other. 
 We still dispute as to whether Fox or Pitt was the greater leader, the 
 greater orator ; it is probable that for a long time to come the same ques- 
 tion will be asked by political students about Gladstone and Disraeli. For 
 many years Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel stood thus opposed. 
 They will often come into contrast and comparison in these pages. For 
 the present it is enough to say that Peel had by far the more original 
 mind, and that Lord John Russell never obtained so great an influence 
 over the House of Commons as that which his rival long enjoyed. The 
 heat of political passion afterwards induced a bitter critic to accuse Peel 
 of lack of originality, because he assimilated readily and turned to account 
 the ideas of other men. Not merely the criticism, but the principle on 
 which it was founded, was altogether wrong. It ought to be left to children 
 to suppose that nothing is original but that which we make up, as the 
 childish phrase is, ' out of our own heads.' Originality in politics, as in 
 every field of art, consists in the use and application of the ideas which we 
 get or are given to us. The greatest proof Sir Robert Peel ever gave of 
 high and genuine statesmanship was in his recognition that the time had 
 come to put into practical legislation the principles which Cobden and 
 Villiers and Bright had been advocating in the House of Commons. Lord 
 John Russell was a born reformer. lie had sat at the feet of Fox. He 
 was cradled in the principles of Liberalism. He held faithfully to his
 
 1837. A HISTORY Ul' OUR OWN TIMES. 25 
 
 creed ; he was one of its boldest :ind keenest champions, lie had great 
 advantages over Peel, in the mere fact that he had begun his education in 
 A more enlightened school. But he wanted passion quite as much as Peel 
 did, and remained still farther than Peel below the level of the genuine 
 orator. Russell, as we have said, had not long held the post of leader of 
 the House of Commons when the first Parliament of Queen Victoria 
 assembled. He was still, in a manner, on trial ; and even among his 
 friends, perhaps especially among his friends, there were whispers that his 
 confidence in himself was greater than his capacity for leadership. 
 
 After the chiefs of Ministry and of Opposition, the most conspicuous 
 ligure in the House of Commons was the colcssal form of O'Connell, the 
 great Irish agitator, of whom we shall hear a good deal more. Among the 
 foremost orators of the House at that time was O'Connell's impassioned 
 lieutenant, Richard Lalor Sheil. It is curious how little is now remem- 
 bered of Sheil, whom so many well-qualified authorities declared to be a 
 genuine orator. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his novels, speaks of Shell's 
 eloquence in terms of the highest praise, and disparages Canning. It is 
 but a short time since Mr. Gladstone selected Sheii as one of three re- 
 markable illustrations of great success as a speaker achieved in spite of 
 serious defects of voice and delivery ; the other two examples being Dr. 
 Chalmers and Dr. Newman. Mr. Gladstone described Shell's voice as like 
 nothing but the sound produced by ' a tin kettle battered about from place 
 to place,' knocking first against one side and then against another. ' In 
 anybody else,' Mr. Gladstone went on to say, ' I would not, if it had been 
 in my choice, like to have listened to that voice ; but in him I would not 
 have changed it, for it was part of a most remarkable whole, and nobody 
 ever felt it painful while listening to it. lie was a great orator, and an 
 orator of much preparation, I believe, carried even to words, with a very 
 vivid imagination and an enormous power of language and of strong feel- 
 ing. There was a peculiar character, a sort of half wildness in his aspect 
 and delivery ; his whole figure, and his delivery and his voice and his 
 matter were all in such perfect keeping with one another that they formed 
 a great Parliamentary picture ; and although it is now thirty-five years 
 since I heard Mr. Sheil, my recollection of him is just as vivid as if I had 
 been listening to him to-day.' This surely is a picture of a great orator, 
 as Mr. Gladstone says Sheii was. Nor is it easy to understand how a man 
 without being a great orator could have persuaded two experts of such 
 very different schools as Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Dis^neli, that he deserved 
 such a name. Yet the after years have in a curious but unmistakable way 
 denied the claims of Sheil. Perhaps it is because, if he really was an 
 orator, he was that and nothing more, that our practical age, finding no
 
 2G A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 01. n. 
 
 mark left by him on Parliament or politics, has declined to take much 
 account even of his eloquence. His career faded away into second-class 
 ministerial office, and closed at last, somewhat prematurely, in the little 
 court of Florence, where he was sent as the representative of England. 
 He is worth mentioning here because he had the promise of a splendid 
 reputation ; because the charm of his eloquence evidently lingered long 
 in the memories of those to whom it was once familiar, and because his is 
 one of the most brilliant illustrations of that career of Irish agitator, which 
 begins in stormy opposition to English government and subsides after a 
 while into meek recognition of its title and adoption of its ministerial uni- 
 form. O'Connell we have passed over for the present, because we shall 
 hear of him again ; but of Sheil it is not necessary that we should hear 
 any more. 
 
 This was evidently a remarkable Parliament, with Russell for the 
 leader of one party, and Peel for the leader of another ; with O'Connell 
 and Sheil as independent supporters of the Ministry ; with Mr. Gladstone 
 still comparatively new to public life, and Mr. Disraeli to address the 
 Commons for the first time; with Palmerston still unrecognised and 
 Stanley lately gone over to Conservatism, itself the newest invented thing 
 in politics ; with Grote and Bulwer, and Joseph Hume and Charles 
 Buller; and Ward and Villicrs, Sir Francis Burdett and Smith O'Brien 
 and the Radical Alcibiades of Finsbury, ' Torn ' Duncombe. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 CANADA AND LORD DUIMIAM. 
 
 THE first disturbance to the quiet and good promise of the new reign came 
 from Canada. The Parliament which we have described met ibr the first 
 time on November 20, 1837, and was to have been adjourned to February 
 1, 1838 ; but the news which began to arrive from Canada was so alarming, 
 that the Ministry were compelled to change their purpose and fix the re- 
 assembling of the Houses for January 16. The disturbances in Canada 
 had already broken out into open rebellion. 
 
 The condition of Canada was very peculiar. Lower or Eastern Canada 
 was inhabited for the most part by men of French descent, who still kept 
 up in the midst of an active and moving civilisation most of the principles 
 und usages which belonged to France before the Revolution. Even to this 
 iay, after all the changes, political and social, that have taken place, the
 
 1337. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMIiS. 27 
 
 traveller from Europe sees in many of the towns of Lower Canada an old- 
 fashioned France, such as he had known otherwise only in books that tell 
 of France before '89. Nor is this only in small sequestered towns and 
 villages which the impulses of modern ways have yet failed to reach. In 
 busy and trading Montreal, with its residents made up of Englishmen, 
 Scotchmen and Americans, as well as the men of French descent, the 
 visitor is more immediately conscious of the presence of what may be 
 called an old-fashioned Catholicism than he is in Paris, or even indeed in 
 Koine. In Quebec, a city which for picturesqueness and beauty of situa- 
 tion is not equalled by Edinburgh or Florence, the curious interest of the 
 place is further increased, the novelty of the sensations it produces in the 
 visitor is made more piquant, by the evidences he meets with everywhere, 
 through its quaint and steepy streets, and under its antiquated archways, 
 of the existence of a society which has hardly in France survived the 
 Great Revolution. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign, the undiluted 
 character of this French medievalism was of course much more remarkable. 
 It would doubtless have exhibited itself quietly enough if it were absolutely 
 undiluted. Lower Canada would have dozed away in its sleepy picturesque- 
 ness, held fast to its ancient ways, and allowed a bustling giddy world, all 
 alive with commerce and ambition, and desire for novelty and the terribly 
 disturbing thing which unresting people call progress, to rush on its wild 
 path unheeded. But its neighbours and its newer citizens were not dis- 
 posed to allow Lower Canada thus to rot itself in ease on the decaying 
 wharfs of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. In the large towns there 
 were active traders from England and other countries, who were by no 
 means content to put up Avith old-world ways and to let the magnificent 
 resources of the place run to waste. Upper Canada, on the other hand, 
 was all new as to its population, and was full of the modern desire for 
 commercial activity. Upper Canada was peopled almost exclusively by 
 inhabitants from Great Britain. Scotch settlers, with all the energy and 
 push of their country; men from the northern province of Ireland, Avho 
 might be described as virtually Scotch also, came there. The emigrant 
 from the south of Ireland went to the United States because he found there 
 a country more or less hostile to England, and because there the Catholic 
 Church was understood to be flourishing. The Ulsterman went to Canada 
 a,s the Scotchman did, because he saw the flag of England flying and the 
 principle of religious establishment which he admired at home still recog- 
 nised. It is almost needless to say that Englishmen in great, numbers were 
 settled there, whose chief desire was to make the colony as far as possible 
 a copy of the institutions of England. When Canada was ceded to England 
 by France, as a consequence of the victories of Wolfe, the population was?
 
 28 A HISTORY OF OUIt OWN T1MKH. en. ui. 
 
 nearly all in the lower province, and therefore was nearly all of French 
 origin. Since the cession the growth of the population of the other pro- 
 vince had been surprisingly rapid, and had been almost exclusively the 
 growth, as we have seen, of immigration from Great Britain, one or 
 two of the colonising states of the European continent, and the American 
 Republic itself. 
 
 It is easy to see on the very face of things some of the difficulties which 
 must arise in the development of such a system. The French of Lower 
 Canada would regard with almost morbid jealousy any legislation which 
 appeared likely to interfere with their ancient ways and to give any ad- 
 rantage or favour to the populations of British descent. The latter would 
 see injustice or feebleness in every measure which did not assist them in 
 developing their more energetic ideas. The home Government in such 
 a condition of things often has especial trouble with those whom we 
 may call its own people. Their very loyalty to the institutions of the old 
 country impels them to be unreasonable and exacting. It is not easy to 
 make them understand why they should not be at the least encouraged, ii 
 not indeed actually enabled, to carry boldly out the Anglicising policy 
 which they clearly see is to be for the good of the colony in the end. 
 The Government has all the difficulty that the mother of a household hao 
 when, with the best intentions and the most conscientious resolve to act 
 impartially, she is called upon to manage her own children and the children 
 of her husband's former marriage. Every word she says, every resolve 
 she is induced to acknowledge, is liable to be regarded with jealousy and 
 dissatisfaction on the one side as well as on the other. ' You are doing 
 everything to favour your own children,' the one set cry out. ' You ought 
 to do something more for your own children,' is the equally querulous 
 remonstrance of the other. 
 
 It would have been difficult, therefore, for the home Government, 
 however wise and far-seeing their policy, to make the wheels of any system 
 run smoothly at once in such a colony as Canada. But their policy cer- 
 tainly does not seem to have been either wise or far-seeing. The plan of 
 government adopted looks as if it were especially devised to bring out into 
 sharp relief all the antagonisms that were natural to the existing state of 
 things. By an Act called the Constitution of 1791, Canada was divided 
 into two provinces, the Upper and the Lower. Each province had a 
 separate system of government, consisting of a governor, an executive 
 council appointed by the Crown, and supposed in some way to resemble 
 the Privy Council of this country ; a legislative council, the members of 
 which were appointed by the Crown for life ; and a representative assembly, 
 me members of which were elected for four years. At the same time the
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMF.S. 20 
 
 clergy reserves were established by Parliament. One-seventh of the waste- 
 lands of the colony was set aside for the maintenance of the Protestant 
 clergy, a fruitful source of disturbance and ill-feeling. 
 
 When the two provinces were divided in 1791, the intention was that 
 they should remain distinct in fact as well as in name. It was hoped that 
 Lower Canada would remain altogether French, and that Upper Canada 
 woiild be exclusively English. Then it was thought that they might bo 
 governed on their separate systems as securely arid with as little trouble as 
 we now govern the Mauritius on one system and Malta on another. Those 
 who formed such an idea do not seem to have taken any counsel with 
 geography. The one fact, that Upper Canada can hardly be said to have 
 any means of communication with Europe and the whole Eastern world 
 except through Lower Canada, or else through the United States, ought to 
 have settled the question at once. It was in Lower Canada that the greatest 
 difficulties arose. A constant antagonism grew up between the majority 
 of the legislative council, who were nominees of the Crown, and the 
 majority of the representative assembly, who were elected by the popula- 
 tion of the province. The home Government encoiiraged and indeed kept 
 up that most odious and dangerous of all instruments for the supposed 
 management of a colony a ' British party ' devoted to the so-called interests 
 of the mother country, and obedient to the word of command from their 
 masters and patrons at home. The majority in the legislative council 
 constantly thwarted the resolutions of the vast majority of the popular 
 assembly. Disputes arose as to the voting of supplies. The Government 
 retained in their sevice officials whom the representative assembly had con- 
 demned, and insisted on the right to pay them their salaries out of certain 
 funds of the colony. The representative assembly took to stopping the 
 supplies, and the Government claimed the right to counteract this measure 
 by appropriating to the purpose such public moneys as happened to be 
 within their reach at the time. The colony for indeed on these subjects 
 the population of Lower Canada, right or wrong, was so near to being of 
 one mind that we may take the declarations of public meetings as repre- 
 senting the colony demanded that the legislative council should be made 
 elective, and that the colonial Government should not be allowed to dispose 
 of the moneys of the colony at their pleasure. The House of Commons 
 and the Government here replied by refusing to listen to the proposal to 
 make the legislative coiuicil an elective body, and authorising the provincial 
 Government, without the consent of the colonial representation, to appro- 
 priate the money in the treasury for the administration of justice and the 
 maintenance of the executive system. This was in plain words to announce 
 to the French population, who made up the vast majority, and Avhom we
 
 30 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. in. 
 
 had taught to believe in the representative form of government, that their 
 wishes would never count for anything, and that the colony was to be ruled 
 solely at the pleasure of the little British party of officials and crown 
 nominees. It is not necessary to suppose that in all these disputes the 
 popular majority were in the right and the officials in the wrong. No one 
 can doubt that there was much bitterness of feeling arising out of the more 
 differences of race. The French and the English could not be got to 
 blend. In some places, as it was afterwards said in the famous report of 
 Lord Durham, the two sets of colonists never publicly met together except 
 in the jury-box, and then only for the obstruction of justice. The British 
 residents complained bitterly of being subject to French law and procedure 
 in so many of their affairs. The tenure of land and many other conditions 
 of the system were antique French, and the French law worked, or rather 
 did not work, in civil affairs side by side with the equally impeded British 
 law in criminal matters. At last the representative assembly refused to 
 vote any further supplies or to carry on any further business. They formu- 
 lated their grievances against the home Government. Their complaints 
 were of arbitrary conduct on the part of the governors ; intolerable compo- 
 sition of the legislative council, which they insisted ought to be elective ; 
 illegal appropriation of the public money ; and violent prorogation of the 
 provincial parliament. 
 
 One of the leading men in the movement which afterwards became 
 rebellion in Lower Canada was Mr. Louis Joseph Papineau. This man 
 had risen to high position by his talents, his energy, and his undoubtedly 
 honourable character. He had represented Montreal in the Representative 
 Assembly of Lower Canada, and he afterwards became Speaker of the 
 House. He made himself leader of the movement to protest against the 
 policy of the governors, and that of the Government at home by whom 
 they were sustained. He held a series of meetings, at some of which un- 
 doubtedly rather strong language was used, and too frequent and significant 
 appeals were made to the example held out to the population of Lower 
 Canada by the successful revolt of the United States. Mr. Papineau also 
 planned the calling together of a great convention to discuss and proclaim 
 the grievances of the colonies. Lord Gosford, the governor, began by dis- 
 missing several militia officers who had taken part in some of these demon- 
 strations; Mr. Papineau himself was an officer of this force. Then thc- 
 governor issued warrants for the apprehension of many members of the 
 popular Assembly on the charge of high treason. Some of these at once 
 left the country ; others against whom warrants were issued were arrested, 
 and a sudden resistance was made by their friends and supporters. Then, 
 in the manner familiar to all who have read anything of the: history of
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 31 
 
 revolutionary movements, the resistance to a capture of prisoners suddenly 
 transformed itself into open rebellion. 
 
 The rebellion was not in a military sense a very great thing. At its 
 first outbreak the military authorities were for a moment surprised, and 
 the rebels obtained one or two trifling advantages. But the commander - 
 in-chief at once showed energy adequate to the occasion, and used, as it 
 was his duty to do, a strong hand in putting the movement down. The 
 rebels fought with something like desperation in one or two instances, and 
 there was, it must be said, a good deal of blood shed. The disturbance, 
 however, after a while extended to the upper province. Upper Canada 
 too had its complaints against its governors and the home Government, 
 and its protests against having its offices all disposed of by a ' family com- 
 pact ; ' but the rebellious movement docs not seem to have taken a genuine 
 hold of the province at any time. There was some discontent ; there was a 
 constant stimulus to excitement kept up from across the American frontier by 
 sympathisers with any republican movement; and there were some excitable 
 persons inclined for revolutionary change in the province itself whose zeal 
 caught fire when the flame broke out in Lower Canada. But it seems tc 
 have been an exotic movement altogether, and so far as its military history 
 is concerned, deserves notice chiefly for the chivalrous eccentricity of the 
 plan by which the governor of the province undertook to put it down. 
 The governor was the gallant and fanciful soldier and traveller, Sir Francis, 
 then Major, Head. He, who had fought at Waterloo and seen much service 
 besides, was quietly performing the duties of Assistant Poor Law Com- 
 missioner for the county of Kent, when he was summoned, in 1835, at a 
 moment's notice, to assume the governorship of Upper Canada. When the 
 rebellion broke out in that province, Major Head proved himself not merely 
 equal to the occasion, but boldly superior to it. He promptly resolved to 
 win a grand moral victory over all rebellion then and for the future. lie 
 was seized with a desire to show to the whole world how vain it was for 
 any disturber to think of shaking the loyalty of the province under his 
 control. He issued to rebellion in general a challenge not unlike that 
 which Shakespeare's Prince Harry offers to the chiefs of the insurrection 
 against Henry IV. He invited it to come on and settle the controversy 
 by a sort of duel. He sent all the regular soldiers out of the province to 
 the help of the authoritias of Lower Canada ; he allowed the rebels to 
 mature their plans in any way they liked ; he permitted them to choose 
 their own day and hour ; and when they were ready to begin their assaults 
 on constituted aiithority, he summoned to his side the militia and all the 
 loyal inhabitants, and with their help he completely extinguished the re- 
 bellion It was "but a very trifling affair ; it went out or collapsed in a
 
 32 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. m. 
 
 moment. Major Head had his desire. He showed that rebellion in that 
 province was not a thing serious enough to call for the intervention of 
 regular troops. The loyal colonists were for the most part delighted with 
 the spirited conduct of their leader and his new-fashioned way of dealing 
 with rebellion. No doubt the moral effect was highly imposing. The 
 plan was almost as original as that described in Herodotus and introduced 
 into one of Massinger's plays, when the moral authority of the masters is 
 made to assert itself over the rebellious slaves by the mere exhibition of 
 the symbolic whip. But the authorities at home took a somewhat more 
 prosaic view of the policy of Sir Francis Head. It was suggested that if 
 the fears of many had been realised and the rebellion had been aided by a 
 large force of sympathisers from the United States, the moral authority of 
 Canadian loyalty might have stood greatly in need of the material presence 
 of regular troop?. In the end Sir Francis Head resigned his office. His 
 loyalty, courage and success were acknowledged by the gift of a baronetcy ; 
 and he obtained the admiration not merely of those who approved his 
 policy, but even of many among those who felt bound to condemn it. 
 Perhaps it may be mentioned that there were some who persisted to the 
 last in the belief that Sir Francis Head was not by any means so rashly 
 chivalrous as he had allowed himself to be thought, and that he had full 
 preparation made, if his moral demonstration should fail, to supply its 
 place in cood time with more commonplace and effective measures. 
 
 The news of the outbreaks in Canada created a natural excitement in 
 this country. There was a very strong feeling of sympathy among many 
 classes here not, indeed, with the rebellion, but with the colony which 
 complained of what seemed to be genuine and serious grievances. Public 
 meetings were held at which resolutions were passed ascribing the disturb- 
 ances in the first place to the refusal by the Government of any redress 
 sought for by the colonists. Mr. Hume, the pioneer of financial reform, 
 took the side of ihe colonists very warmly, both in and out of Parliament. 
 During one of the Parliamentary debates on the subject, Sir Robert Peel 
 referred to the principal leader of the rebellion in Upper Canada as ' a Mr. 
 Mackenzie.' Mr. Hume resented this way of speaking of a prominent 
 colonist, and remarked that ' there was a Mr. Mackenzie as there might be 
 a Sir Robert Peel,' and created some amusement by referring to the de- 
 clarations of Lord Chatham on the American Stamp Act, which he cited 
 as the opinions of 'a Mr. Pitt.' Lord John Russell on the part of the 
 Government introduced a bill to deal with the rebellious province. The 
 bill proposed in brief to suspend for a time the constitution of Lower 
 Canada, and to send out from this country a governor-general and high 
 commissioner, with full powers to deal with the rebellion, and to remodel
 
 1838. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 33 
 
 the constitution of both provinces. The proposal met with a good deal of 
 opposition at first on very different grounds. Mr. Roebuck, who was 
 then, as it happened, out of Parliament, appeared as the agent and repre- 
 sentative of the province of Lower Canada, and demanded to be heard at 
 the bar of both the houses in opposition to the bill. After some littlo 
 demur his demand was granted, and he stood at the bar, first of the 
 Commons, and then of the Lords, and opposed the bill on the ground that 
 it unjustly suspended the constitution of Lower Canada in consequence of 
 disturbances provoked by the intolerable oppression of the home Govern- 
 ment. A critic of that day remarked that most orators seemed to make 
 it their business to conciliate and propitiate the audience they desired to 
 win over, but that Mr. Roebuck seemed from the very first to be deter- 
 mined to set all his hearers against him and his cause. Mr. Roebuck's 
 speeches were, however, exceedingly argumentative and powerful appeals. 
 Their effect was enhanced by the singularly youthful appearance of the 
 speaker, who is described as looking like a boy hardly out of his teens. 
 
 It was evident, however, that the proposal of the Government must in 
 the main be adopted. The general opinion of Parliament decided not 
 unreasonably that that was not the moment for entering into a considera- 
 tion of the past policy of the Government, and that the country could do 
 nothing better just then than send out some man of commanding ability 
 and character to deal with the existing condition of things. There was an 
 almost universal admission that the Government had i'ound the right man 
 when Lord John Russell mentioned the name of Lord Durham. 
 
 Lord Durham was a man of remarkable character. It is a matter of 
 surprise how little his name is thought of by the present generation, seeing 
 what a strenuous figure he seemed in the eyes of his contemporaries, and 
 how striking a part he played in the politics of a time which has even 
 still some living representatives. He belonged to one of the oldest fami- 
 lies in England. The Lambtons had lived on their estate in the north, in 
 uninterrupted succession, since the Conquest. The male succession, it is 
 stated, never was interrupted since the twelfth century. They were not, 
 however, a family of aristocrats. Their wealth was derived chiefly from 
 coal mines, and grew up in later days ; the property at first, and fur a 
 long time, was of inconsiderable value. For more than a century, how- 
 ever, the Lambtons had come to take rank among the gentry of the county, 
 and some member of the family had represented the city of Durham in the 
 House of Commons from 1727 until the early death of Lord Durham's father 
 in December 1797. William Henry Larnbton, Lord Durham's father, was H 
 staunch Whig, and had been a friend and associate of Fox. John George 
 Laiobton, the son, was born at Lambtori Castle in April 1792. Before 
 
 VOL. i. D
 
 34 A HISTOKY OF Otllt OW* TIMES. CH. m 
 
 was quite twenty years of age, he made a romantic marriage t Gretna 
 ,G.$een with a lady who died three years after. He served for a short time 
 in a regiment of Hussars. About a year after the death of his first wife, he 
 married the eldest daughter of Lord Grey. He was then only twenty-four 
 years of age. He had before this been returned to Parliament for the county 
 of Durham, and he soon distinguished himself as a very advanced and ener- 
 getic reformer. While in the Commons he seldom addressed the House, 
 but when he did speak, it was in support of some measure of reform, or 
 against what he conceived to be antiquated and illiberal legislation. He 
 brought out a plan of his own for Parliamentary reform in 1821. In 
 1828 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Durham. 
 When the Ministry of Lord Grey was formed, in November 1830, Lord 
 Durham became Lord Privy Seal. He is said to have had an almost com- 
 plete control over Lord Grey. He had an impassioned and energetic 
 nature, which sometimes drove him into outbreaks of feeling which most 
 of his colleagues dreaded. Various highly coloured descriptions of stormy 
 scenes between him and his companions in office are given by writers of 
 the time. Lord Durham, his enemies, and some of his friends said, 
 bullied and browbeat his opponents in the Cabinet, and would sometimes 
 hardly allow his father-in-law and official chief a chance of putting in a 
 word on the other side, or in mitigation of his tempestuous mood. He 
 was thorough in his reforming purposes, and would have rushed at radical 
 changes with scanty consideration for the time or for the temper of his 
 opponents. He had very little reverence indeed for what Carlyle calls 
 the majesty of custom. Whatever he wished he strongly wished. He 
 had no idea of reticence, and cared not much for the decorum of office. 
 It is not necessary to believe all the stories told by those who hated and 
 dreaded Lord Durham, in order to accept the belief that he really was 
 somewhat of an enfant terrible to the stately Lord Grey, and to the easy- 
 going colleagues who were by no means absolutely eaten up by their zeal 
 ibrjireform. In the powerful speech which he delivered in the House of 
 Lords on the Reform Bill, there is a specimen of his eloquence of denuncia- 
 tion which might well have startled listeners even in those days when the 
 iicenoe of speech was often sadly out of proportion with its legalised 
 liberty. Lord Durham was especially roused to anger by some observa- 
 tions made in the debate of a previous night by the Bishop of Exeter. 
 He described the prelate's speech as an exhibition of ' coarse and virulent 
 invective, malignant and false insinuation, the grossest perversions of his- 
 torical facts decked out with all the choicest flowers of pamphleteering 
 elaug.' He was called to order for these words, and a peer moved that 
 they be taken down. Lord Durham was by no moans dismayed, lie
 
 1833. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 35 
 
 coolly declared that he did not mean to defend his language as the most 
 elegant or graceful, but that it exactly conveyed the ideas regarding the 
 bishop which he meant to express ; that he believed the bishop's speech 
 to contain insinuations which were as false as scandalous ; that he had 
 said so ; that he now begged leave to repeat the words, and that he paused 
 to give any noble lord who thought fit, an opportunity of taking them 
 down. No one, however, seemed disposed to encounter any farther this 
 impassioned adversary, and when he had had his say, Lord Durham be- 
 came somewhat mollified, and endeavoured to soften the pain of the im- 
 pression he had made. He begged the House of Lords to make some 
 allowance for him if he had spoken too warmly ; for, as he said with much 
 pathetic force, his mind had lately been tortured by domestic loss. He 
 thus alluded to the recent death of his eldest son ' a beautiful boy,' says 
 a writer of some years ago, ' whose features will live for ever in the well- 
 known picture by Lawrence. 1 
 
 The whole of this incident, the fierce attack and the sudden pathetic 
 expression of regret, will serve well enough to illustrate the emotional, un- 
 controlled character of Lord Durham. He was one of the men who, even 
 when they are thoroughly in the right, have often the unhappy art of 
 seeming to put themselves completely in the wrong. He was the most 
 advanced of all the reformers in the reforming Ministry of Lord Grey. 
 His plan of Reform in 1821 proposed to give four hundred members to 
 certain districts of town and country, in which every householder should 
 have a vote. When Lord Grey had formed his reform Ministry, Lord 
 Durham sent for Lord John Russell and requested him to draw up a 
 scheme of reform. A committee was formed on Lord Durham's sugges- 
 tion, consisting of Sir James Graham, Lord Duncannon, Lord John 
 Russell, and Lord Durham himself. Lord John Russell drew up a plan, 
 which he published long after with the alterations which Lord Durham 
 had suggested and written in his own hand on the margin. If Lord 
 Durham had had his way, the Ballot would at that time have been in- 
 cluded in the programme of the Government; and it was indeed under- 
 stood that at one period of the discussions he had won over his colleagues 
 to his opinion on that subject. He was in a word the Radical member of 
 the Cabinet, with all the energy which became such a character ; with 
 that ' magnificent indiscretion ' which had been attributed to a greater 
 man, Edmund Burke ; with all that cotirage of his opinions which, in the 
 Frenchified phraseology of modern politics, is so much talked of, so rarely 
 found, and so little trusted or successful when it is found. 
 
 Not long after Lord Durham was raised in the peerage and became an 
 earl. His influence over Lord Grey continued great, but his differences 
 
 i> 2
 
 36 A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. CH. m 
 
 of opinion with his former colleagues he had resigned his office became 
 greater and greater every day. More than once he had taken the public 
 into his confidence in his characteristic and heedless way. He was sent 
 on a mission to Russia, perhaps to get him out of the way, and afterwards 
 he was made ambassador at the Russian court. In the interval between 
 his mission and his formal appointment he had come back to England and 
 performed a series of enterprises which in the homely and undignified 
 language of American politics would probably be called ' stumping the 
 country.' He was looked to with much hope by the more extreme Liberals 
 in the country, and with corresponding dislike and dread by all who 
 thought the country had gone far enough, or much too far, in the recent 
 political changes. 
 
 None of his opponents, however, denied his great ability. He was 
 never deterred by conventional beliefs and habits from looking boldly into 
 the very heart of a great political difficulty. He was never afraid to pro- 
 pose what in times later than his have been called heroic remedies. There 
 was a general impression, perhaps even among those who liked him least, 
 that he was a sort of ' unemployed Caesar,' a man who only required a field 
 large enough to develop great qualities in the ruling of men. The difficul- 
 ties in Canada seemed to have come as if expressly to give him an oppor- 
 tunity of proving himself all that his friends declared him to be, or of 
 justifying for ever the distrust of his enemies. He went out to Canada 
 with the assurance of everyone that his expedition would either make or 
 mar a career, if not a country. 
 
 Lord Durham went out to Canada with the brightest hopes and pros- 
 pects. He took with him two of the men best qualified in England at that 
 time to make his mission a success Mr. Charles Buller and Mr. Edward 
 Gibbon Wakefield. He understood that he was going out as a dictator, 
 and there can be no doubt that his expedition was regarded in this light 
 by England and by the colonies. We have remarked that people looked 
 cn his mission as likely to make or mar a career, if not a country. What 
 it did, however, was somewhat different from that which anyone expected. 
 Lord Durham found out a new alternative. He made a country and he 
 marred a career. He is distinctly the founder of the system which has 
 since worked with such gratifying success in Canada ; he is the founder 
 even of the principle which allowed the quiet development of the provinces 
 into a confederation with neighbouring colonies under the name of the 
 Dominion of Canada. But the singular quality which in home politics 
 had helped to mar so much of Lord Durham's personal career was in full 
 work during his visit to Canada. It would not be easy to find in modern 
 political history so curious an example of splendid and lasting success
 
 !838. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 37 
 
 combined with all the appearance of utter and disastrous failure. The 
 mission of Lord Durham saved Canada. It ruined Lord Durham. At 
 tlie moment it seemed to superficial observers to have been as injurious to 
 the colony as to the man. 
 
 Lord Durham arrived in Quebec at the end of May, 1838. He at 
 once issued a proclamation, in style like that of a dictator. It was not in 
 any way unworthy of the occasion, which especially called for the inter- 
 vention of a brave and enlightened dictatorship. He declared that he 
 would unsparingly punish any who violated the laws, but he frankly 
 invited the co-operatioD of the colonies to form a new system of govern- 
 ment really suited to their wants and to the altering conditions of civilisa- 
 tion. Unfortunately, he had hardly entered on his work of dictatorship 
 when he found that he was no longer a dictator. In the passing of the 
 Canada Bill through Parliament the powers which he understood were to 
 be conferred upon him had been considerably reduced. Lord Durham 
 went to work, however, as if he were still invested with absolute authority 
 over all the laws and conditions of the colony. A very Ctesar laying down 
 the lines for the future government of a province could hardly have been 
 more boldly arbitrary. Let it be said also that Lord Durham's arbitrari- 
 ness was for the most part healthy in effect and just in spirit. But it gave 
 an immense opportunity of attack on himself and on the Government to 
 the enemies of both at home. Lord Durham had hardly begun his work 
 of reconstruction when his recall was clamoured for by vehement voices 
 in Parliament. 
 
 Lord Durham began by issuing a series of ordinances intended to 
 provide for the security of Lower Canada. He proclaimed a very liberal 
 amnesty, to which, however, there were certain exceptions. The leaders 
 of the rebellious movement, Papineau and others, who had escaped from 
 the colony, were excluded from the amnesty. So likewise were certain 
 prisoners who either had voluntarily confessed themselves guilty of high 
 treason, or had been induced to make such an acknowledgment in the 
 hope of obtaining a mitigated punishment. These Lord Durham ordered 
 to be transported to Bermuda ; and for any of these, or of the leaders who 
 had escaped, who should return to the colony without permission, he pro- 
 claimed that they should be deemed guilty of high treason and condemned 
 to suffer death. It needs no learned legal argument to prove that this was a 
 proceeding not to be justified by any of the ordinary forms of law. Lord 
 Durham had no power to transport anyone to Bermuda. He had no 
 authority over Bermuda ; he had no authority which he could delegate to 
 the officials of Bermuda enabling them to detain political prisoners. Nor 
 a ad he any power to declare that persons who returned to the colony were
 
 H8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. m. 
 
 to be liable to the punishment of death. It is not a capital offence by 
 any of the laws of England for even a transported convict to break bounds 
 and return to his home. All this was quite illegal; that is to say, was 
 outside the limits of Lord Durham's legal authority. Lord Durham was 
 well aware of the fact. He had not for a moment supposed that he was 
 acting in accordance with ordinary English law. He was acting in the 
 spirit of a dictator, at once bold and merciful, who is under the impression 
 that he has been invested with extraordinary powers for the very reason 
 that the crisis does not admit of the ordinary operations of law. For the 
 decree of death to banished men returning without permission, he had 
 indeed the precedent and authority of acts passed already by the colonial 
 Parliament itself; but Lord Durham did not care for any such authority. 
 He found that he had on his hands a considerable number of prisoners 
 whom it would be absurd to put on trial in Lower Canada with the usual 
 forms of law. It would have been absolutely impossible to get any un- 
 packed jury to convict them. They would have been triumphantly ac- 
 quitted. The authority of the Crown would have been brought into greater 
 contempt than ever. So little faith had the colonists in the impartial 
 working of the ordinary law in the governor's hands, that the universal 
 impression in Lower Canada was that Lord Durham would have the 
 prisoners tried by a packed jury of his own officials, convicted as a matter 
 of course, and executed out of hand. It was with amazement people found 
 that the new governor would not stoop to the infamy of packing a jury. 
 Lord Durham saw no better way out of the difficulty than to impo&e a 
 sort of exile on those who admitted their connection with the rebellion, 
 and to prevent by the threat of a severe penalty the return of those who 
 had already fled from the colony. His amnesty measure was large and 
 liberal ; but he did not see that he could allow prominent offenders tc. 
 remain unrebuked in the colony ; and to attempt to bring them to tria." 
 would have been to secure for them, not punishment, but public honour. 
 
 Another measure of Lord Durham's was likewise open to the charge of 
 excessive use of pow^r. The act which appointed him prescribed that he 
 should be advised by a council, and that every ordinance of his should be 
 signed by at least five of its members. There was already a council in 
 existence nominated by Lord Durham's predecessor, Sir J. Colbornc ; a 
 sort of provisional government put together to supply for the moment the 
 place of the suspended political constitution. This council Lord Durham 
 set aside altogether, and substituted for it one of his own making, and 
 composed chiefly of his secretaries and the members of his staff. In truth 
 this was but a part of the policy which he had marked out for himself. 
 He was resolved to play the game which he honestly believed lie could
 
 838. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 3D 
 
 play better than anyone else. He had in his mind, partly from the inspira- 
 tion of the gifted and well-instructed men whc accompanied and advises 
 him, a plan which he was firmly convinced would be the salvation of the 
 colony. Events have proved that he was right. His disposal of the 
 prisoners was only a clearing of the decks for the great action of remodel- 
 ling the colony. lie did not allow a form of law to stand between him and 
 his purpose. Indeed, as we have already said, he regarded himself as 
 dictator sent out to reconstruct a whole system in the best way he could 
 When he was accused of having gone beyond the law, he asked with a 
 scorn not wholly unreasonable : ' What are the constitutional principles 
 remaining in force where the whole constitution is suspended ? What 
 principle of the British Constitution holds good in a country where- fhe 
 people's money is taken from them without the people's consent ; where 
 representative government is annihilated; where martial law has been.thie 
 law of the land, and where trial by jury exists only to defeat the enda,,qf 
 justice, and to provoke the righteous scorn and indignation of the pom,- 
 munity ? ' 
 
 Still there can be no doubt that a less impetuous and impatient spifi,t 
 than that of Lord Durham might have found a way of beginning his great 
 reforms without provoking such a storm of hostile criticism. He was, it 
 must always be remembered, a dictator who only strove to use his powers 
 for the restoration of liberty and constitutional government. His mode of 
 disposing of his prisoners was arbitrary only in the interests of mercy. H^e 
 declared openly that he did not think it right to send to an ordinary pen^l 
 settlement, and thus brand with infamy, men whom the public feeling of 
 the colony entirely approved, and -whose cause, until they broke into re- 
 bellion, had far more right on its side than that of the authority they 
 complained of could claim to possess. He sent them to Bermuda simply 
 as into exile; to remove them from the colony, but nothing more. ,He 
 lent the weight of this authority to the colonial Act, which prescribed, the 
 penalty of death for returning to the colony, because he believed that the 
 men thus proscribed never would return. 
 
 But his policy met with the severest and most unmeasured criticism 
 at home. If Lord Durham had been guilty of the worst excesses of power 
 which Burke charged against Warren Hastings, he could net have been 
 more fiercely denounced in the House of Lords. He was accused of hav- 
 ing promulgated an ordinance which would enable him to hang men with- 
 out any trial or form of trial. None of his opponents seemed to remeiober, 
 that whether his disposal of the prisoners was right or wrong, it was only 
 a small and incidental part of a great policy covering the readjustment, of 
 the whole political and social system of a splendid colony. The critici?/M
 
 40 A HISTOEl OF CUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 on as if the promulgation of the Quebec ordinances was the be-all 
 snd the end-all of Lord Durham's mission. His opponents made great 
 complaint about the cost of his progress in Canada. Lord Durham had 
 undoubtedly a lavish taste and a love for something like Oriental display. 
 He made his goings about in Canada like a gorgeous royal progress; 
 yet it was well known that he took no remuneration whatever for himself, 
 and did not even accept his own personal travelling expenses. He after- 
 wards stated in the House of Lords that the visit cost him personally ten 
 thousand pounds at least. Mr. Hume, the advocate of economy, made 
 sarcastic comment on the sudden fit of parsimony which seemed to have 
 seized, in Lord Durham's case, men whom he had never before known to 
 raise their voices against any prodigality of expenditure. 
 
 The Ministry was very weak in debating power in the House of Lords. 
 Lord Durham had made enemies there. The opportunity was tempting 
 for assailing him and the Ministry together. Many of the criticisms were 
 undoubtedly the conscientious protests of men who saw danger in any de- 
 parture from the recognised principles of constitutional law. Eminent 
 judges and lawyers in the House of Lords naturally looked above all 
 things to the proper administration of the law as it existed. But it is 
 bard to doubt that political or personal enmity influenced some of the 
 attacks on Lord Durham's conduct. Almost all the leading men in the 
 House of Lords were against him. Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst 
 were for the time leagued in opposition to the Government and in attack 
 on the Canadian policy. Lord Brougham claimed to be consistent. He 
 had opposed the Canada coercion from the beginning, he said, and he 
 opposed illegal attempts to deal with Canada now. It seems a little hard 
 to understand how Lord Brougham could really so far have misunderstood 
 the purpose of Lord Durham's proclamation as to believe that he proposed 
 to hang men without the form of law. However Lord Durham may have 
 broken the technical rules of law, nothing could be more obvious than the 
 fact that he did so in the interest of mercy and generosity, and not that oi 
 tyrannical severity. Lord Brougham inveighed against him with thunder- 
 ing eloquence, as if he were denouncing another Sejanus. It must be 
 owned that his attacks lost some of their moral effect because of his known 
 hatred to Lord Melbourne and the Ministry, and even to Lord Durham 
 himself. People said that Brougham had a special reason for feeling hos- 
 tile to anything done by Lord Durham. A dinner was given to Lord 
 Grey by the Reformers of Edinburgh, in 1834, at which Lord Brougham 
 and Lord Durham were both present. Brougham was called upon to 
 speak, and in the course of his speech he took occasion to condemn cer- 
 tain too zealous Reformers who could not be content with the changes
 
 1838. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 41 
 
 that had been made, but must demand that the Ministry should rush for- 
 ward into wild and extravagant enterprises. He enlarged upon this sub- 
 ject with great vivacity and with amusing variety of humorous and rheto- 
 rical illustration. Lord Durham assumed that the attack was intended for 
 him. His assumption was not unnatural. When ho came in his turn to 
 speak, he was indiscreet enough to reply directly to Lord Brougham, to 
 accept the speech of the former as a personal challenge, and in bitter words 
 to retort invective and sarcasm. The scene was not edifying. The guests 
 were scandalised. The effect of Brougham's speech was wholly spoiled. 
 Brougham was made to seem a disturber of order by the indiscretion which pro- 
 voked into retort a man notoriously indiscreet and incapable of self-restraint. 
 It is not unfair to the memory of so fierce and unsparing a political gladia- 
 tor as Lord Brougham, to assume that when he felt called upon to attack 
 the Canadian policy of Lord Durham, the recollection of the scene at 
 the Edinburgh dinner inspired with additional force his criticism of the 
 Quebec ordinances. 
 
 The Ministry were weak and yielded. They had in the first instance 
 approved of the ordinances, but they quickly gave way and abandoned 
 them. They avoided a direct attempt on the part of Lord Brougham to 
 reverse the policy of Lord Durham by announcing that they had deter- 
 mined to disallow the Quebec ordinances. Lord Durham learned for the 
 first time from an American paper that the Government had abandoned 
 him. He at once announced his determination to give up his position and 
 to return to England. His letter announcing this resolve crossed on the 
 ocean the despatch from home disallowing his ordinances. With charac- 
 teristic imprudence he issued a proclamation from the Castle of St. Lewis, 
 in the city of Quebec, which was virtually an appeal to the public feeling oi 
 the colony against the conduct of her Majesty's Government. When the 
 news of this extraordinary proclamation reached home, Lord Durham was 
 called by the Times newspaper, 'the Lord High Seditioner.' The repre- 
 sentative of the Sovereign, it was said, had appealed to the judgment of 
 a still rebellious colony against the policy of the Sovereign's own advisers. 
 Of course Lord Durham's recall was imavoidable The Government at 
 once sent out a despatch removing him from his place as Governor of 
 British North America. 
 
 Lord Durham had not waited for the formal recall. He returned to 
 England a disgraced man. Yet even then there was public spirit enough 
 among the English people to refuse to ratify any sentence of disgrace upon 
 him. When he landed at Plymouth, he was received with acclamations 
 by the population, although the Government had prevented any of the 
 official honour usually shown to returning governors from being offered to
 
 42 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. in. 
 
 him. Mr. John Stuart Mill has claimed with modest firmness and with 
 perfect justice a leading share in influencing public opinion in favour of 
 Lord Durham. ' Lord Durham,' he says in his Autobiography, ' was 
 bitterly attacked from all sides, inveighed against by enemies, given 
 up by timid friends ; while those who would willingly have defended him 
 did not know what to say. He appeared to be returning a defeated and 
 discredited man. I had followed the Canadian events from the beginning; 
 I had been one of the prompters of his prompters ; his policy was almost 
 exactly what mine would have been, and I was in a position to defend it. 
 I wrote and published a manifesto in the [Westminster] Review, in which 
 I took the very highest ground in his behalf, claiming for him not mere 
 acquittal, but praise and honour. Instantly a number of other writers took up 
 the tone. I believe there was a portion of truth, in what Lord Durham, 
 soon after, with polite exaggeration, said to me, that to this article might be 
 ascribed the almost triumphal reception which he met with on his arrival 
 in England. I believe it to have been the word in season which at a 
 critical moment does much to decide the result ; the touch which deter- 
 mines whether a stone set in motion at the top of an eminence shall roll 
 down on one side or on the other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham 
 as a politician soon vanished ; but with regard to Canadian and generally 
 to colonial policy the cause was gained. Lord Durham's report, written by 
 Charles Buller, partly under the inspiration of Wakefield, began a new 
 era; its recommendations, extending to complete internal self-government, 
 were in full operation in Canada within two or three years, and have been 
 since extended to nearly all the other colonies of European race which 
 have any claim to the character of important communities.' In this in- 
 stance the victa causa pleased not only Cato, but in the end the gods as 
 well. 
 
 Lord Durham's report was acknowledged by enemies as well as by the 
 most impartial critics to be a masterly document. As Mr. Mill has said, 
 it laid the foundation of the political success and social prosperity not only 
 of Canada but of all the other important colonies. After having explained 
 in the most exhaustive manner the causes of discontent and backwardness 
 in Canada, it went on to recommend that the government of the colony 
 should be put as much as possible into the hands of the colonists them- 
 selves, that they themselves should execute as well as make the laws, the 
 limit of the Imperial Government's interference being in such matters as 
 affect the relations of the colony with the mother country, such as the con- 
 stitution and form of government, the regulation of foreign relations and 
 trade, and the disposal of the public lands. Lord Durham proposed to 
 establish a thoroughly good system of municipal institutions ; to secure the
 
 8.W--40. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 43 
 
 independence of the judges ; to make all provincial officers, except the 
 governor and his secretary, responsible to the colonial legislature ; and to 
 repeal all former legislation with respect to the reserves of land for the 
 clergy. Finally, he proposed that the provinces of Canada should bo re- 
 united politically and should become one legislature, containing the repre- 
 sentatives of both races and of all districts. It is significant that the report 
 also recommended that in any act to be introduced for this purpose, a pro- 
 vision should be made by which all or any of the other North American 
 colonies should on the application of their legislatures and with the consent 
 of Canada be admitted into the Canadian Union. Thus the separation 
 which Fox thought unwise was to be abolished, and the Canadas were to 
 be fused into one system, which Lord Durham would have had a federa- 
 tion. In brief, Lord Durham proposed to make the Canadas self- 
 governing as regards their internal affairs, and the germ of a federal 
 union. 
 
 It is not necessary to describe in detail the steps by which the Govern- 
 ment gradually introduced the recommendations of Lord Durham to 
 Parliament and carried them to success. Lord Glenelg, one of the feeblest 
 and most apathetic of colonial secretaries, had retired from office, partly, 
 no doubt, because of the attacks in Parliament on his administration of 
 Canadian affairs. He was succeeded at the Colonial Office by Lord Nor- 
 manby, and Lord Normanby gave way in a few months to Lord John 
 Russell, who was full of energy and earnestness. Lord Durham's successor 
 aod disciple in the work of Canadian government, Lord Sydenham best 
 known as Mr. Charles Poulett Thomson, one of the pioneers of free trade 
 received Lord John Russell's cordial co-operation and support. Lord John 
 Russell introduced into the House of Commons a bill which he described 
 as intended to lay the foundation of a permanent settlement of the affairs 
 of Canada. The measure was postponed for a session because some states- 
 men thought that it would not be acceptable to the Canadians themselves. 
 Some little sputterings of the rebellion had also lingered after Lord 
 Durham's return to this country, and these for a short time had directed 
 attention away from the policy of reorganisation. In 1840, however, the 
 Act was passed which reunited Upper and Lower Canada on the basis 
 proposed by Lord Durham. Further legislation disposed of the clergy 
 reserve lands for the general benefit of all churches and denominations. 
 The way was made clear for that scheme which in times nearer to our 
 own has formed the Dominion of Canada. 
 
 Lord Durham iid not live to &ee the success of the policy he had recom- 
 mended. We may anticipate the close of his career. Within a few days 
 after the passing of the Canada Government Bill he died at Cowes, in the
 
 44 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. ui. 
 
 Isle of Wight, en July 28, 1840. He was then little more than forty- 
 eight years of age. He had for some time been in failing health, and it 
 cannot be doubted that the mortification attending his Canadian mission had 
 worn away his strength. His proud and sensitive spirit could ill bear the 
 contradictions and r.umiliations that had been forced upon him. His was an 
 eager and a passionate nature, full of that sceva indignatio which by his own 
 acknowledgment tortured the heart of Swift. He wanted to the success of 
 his political career that proud patience which the gods are said to love, 
 and by virtue of which great men live down misappreciation, and hold out 
 until they see themselves justified and hear the reproaches turn into cheers. 
 But if Lord Durham's personal career was in any way a failure, his policy 
 for the Canadas was a splendid success. It established the principles of 
 colonial government. There were undoubtedly defects in the construction 
 of the actual scheme which Lord Durham initiated, and which Lord 
 Sydenham, who died not long after him, instituted. The legislative union 
 of the two Canadas was in itself a makeshift, and was only adopted as such. 
 Lord Durham would have had it otherwise if he might ; but he did not see 
 his way then to anything like the complete federation scheme afterwards 
 adopted. But the success of the policy lay in the broad principles it 
 established, and to which other colonial systems as well as that of the 
 Dominion of Canada owe their strength and security to-day. One may 
 say, with little help from the merely fanciful, that the rejoicings of 
 emancipated colonies might have been in his dying ears as he sank intx 
 his early grave. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SCIENCE AND SPEED. 
 
 THE opening of the reign of Queen Victoria coincided with the introduc- 
 tion of many of the great discoveries and applications in science, industry 
 and commerce which we consider specially representative oi modern 
 civilisation. A reign which saw in its earlier years the application of the 
 electric current to the task of transmitting messages, the first successful 
 attempts to make use of steam for the business of Transatlantic navigation, 
 the general development of the railway system all over these countries, 
 and the introduction of the penny post, must be considered to have ob- 
 tained for itself, had it secured no other memorials, an abiding place in 
 history. A distinguished author has lately inveighed against the spirit which 
 would rank such improvements as those just mencioced with the genuine
 
 IS.".?. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 45 
 
 triumphs of the human race, and has gone so far as to insist that there is 
 nothing in any such which might not be expected from the self-interested 
 contrivings of a very inferior animal nature. Amid the tendency to 
 glorify beyond measure the mere mechanical improvements of modern 
 civilisation, it is natural that tnere should arise some angry questioning, 
 some fierce disparagement of all that it has done. There will always be 
 natures to which the philosophy of contemplation must seem far nobler 
 than the philosophy which expresses itself in mechanical action. It may, 
 however, be taken as certain that no people who were ever great in thought 
 and in art wilfully neglected to avail themselves of all possible con- 
 trivances for making life less laborious by the means of mechanical and 
 artificial contrivance. The Greeks were to the best of their opportunity, 
 and when at the highest point of their glory as an artistic race, as eager 
 for the application of all scientific and mechanical contrivances to the 
 business of life as the most practical and boastful Manchester man or 
 Chicago man of our own day. We shall afterwards see that the reign of 
 Queen Victoria came to have a literature, an art, and a philosophy dis- 
 tinctly its own. For the moment we have to do with its industrial 
 science ; or at least with the first remarkable movements in that direction 
 which accompanied the opening of the reign. This at least must be said 
 for them, that they have changed the conditions of human life for us in 
 Bitch a manner as to make the history of the past forty or fifty years 
 almost absolutely distinct from that of any preceding period. In all that 
 part of our social life which is affected by industrial and mechanical 
 appliances, the man of the latter part of the eighteenth century was less 
 widely removed from the Englishman of the days of the Paston Letters 
 than we are removed from the ways of the eighteenth century. The man of 
 the eighteenth century travelled on land and sea in much the same way that 
 his forefathers had done hundreds of years before. His communications by 
 letter with his fellows were carried on in very much the same method. 
 He got his news from abroad and at home after the same slow uncertain 
 fashion. His streets and houses were lighted very much as they might 
 have been when Mr. Pepys was in London. His ideas of drainage and 
 ventilation were equally elementary and simple. Wo sec a complete 
 revolution in all these things. A man of the present day suddenly thrust 
 back fifty years in life, would find himself almost as awkwardly unsuited 
 to the ways of that time as if he were sent back to the age when the 
 Romans occupied Britain. He would find himself harassed at every step 
 he took. He could do hardly anything as he does it to-day. Whatever 
 the moral and philosophical value of the change in the eyes of thinker? too 
 lofty to concern themselves with the common ways and doings of huinar
 
 46 A HISTORY OF OUE OWJS TIMES. CM. rr. 
 
 life, this is certain at least, that the change is of immense historical im- 
 portance, and that even if we look upon life as a mere pageant and show, 
 interesting to wise men only by its curious changes, a wise man of this 
 Bchool could hardly have done better, if the choice lay with him, than to 
 desire that the lines of his life might be so cast as to fall into the earlier 
 part of this present reign. 
 
 It is a somewhat curious coincidence, that in the year when Professor 
 Wheatstone and Mr. Cooke took out their first patent ' for improvements 
 in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric 
 currents transmitted through metallic circuit, 1 Professor Morse, the Ameri- 
 can electrician, applied to Congress for aid in the construction and carry- 
 ing on of a small electric telegraph to convey messages a short distance, 
 and made the application without success. In the following year he came 
 to this country to obtain a patent for his invention ; but he was refused. He 
 had come too late. Our own countrymen were beforehand with him. Very 
 soon after we find experiments made with the electric telegraph between 
 Euston Square and Camden Town. These experiments were made under 
 the authority of the London and North-Western Railway Company, 
 immediately on the taking out of the patent by Messrs. Wheatstone and 
 Cooke. Mr. Robert Stephenson was one of those who came to watch the 
 operation of this new and wonderful attempt to make the currents of the air 
 man's faithful Ariel. The London and Birmingham Railway was opened 
 through its whole length in 1838. The Liverpool and Preston line was 
 opened in the same year. The Liverpool and Birmingham had been opened 
 in the year before; the London and Croydon was opened the year after. The 
 Act for the transmission of the mails by railways was passed in 1838. 'In 
 the same year it was noted as an unparalleled, and to many an almost in- 
 credible, triumph of human energy and science over time and space, that a 
 locomotive had been able to travel at a speed of thirty-seven miles an hour. 
 
 ' The prospect of travelling from the metropolis to Liverpool, a distance 
 of 210 miles, in ten hours, calls forcibly to mind the tales of fairies and 
 genii by which we were amused in our youth, and contrasts forcibly with 
 the fact, attested on the personal experience of the writer of this notice, 
 that about the commencement of the present century, this same journey 
 occupied a space of sixty hours.' These are the words of a writer who 
 gives an interesting account of the railways of England during the first 
 year of the reign of Queen Victoria. In the same volume from which this 
 extract is taken an allusion is made to the possibility of steam communi- 
 cation being successfully established between England and the United 
 States. ' Preparations on a gigantic scale,' a writer is able to announce, 
 ':ire now in a state of great forwardness for trying an experiment in steam
 
 1637-5. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 47 
 
 navigation which has been the subject of much controversy among scientific 
 men. Ships of an enormous size, furnished with steam power equal to the 
 force of 400 horses and upwards, will, before our next volume shall be 
 prepared, have probably decided the question whether this description oi 
 vessels can, in the present state c f our knowledge, profitably engage in 
 Transatlantic voyages. It is possible that these attempts may fail, a result 
 which is indeed predicted by high authorities on this subject. We are 
 more sanguine in our hopes ; but should these be disappointed, we cannot, 
 if we are to judge from our past progress, doubt that longer experience 
 and a further application of inventive genius will at no very distant day 
 render practicable and profitable by this means the longest voyages in 
 which the adventurous spirit of man will lead him to embark.' The 
 experiment thus alluded to was made with perfect success. The Sirius, 
 the Great Western, and the Royal William accomplished voyages between 
 New York and this country in the early part of 1838 ; and it was re- 
 marked, that ' Transatlantic voyages by means of steam may now be said 
 to be as easy of accomplishment, with ships of adequate size and power, 
 as the passage between London and Margate.' The Great Western crossed 
 the ocean from Bristol to New York in fifteen days. She was followed 
 by the Sirius, which left Cork for New York, and made the passage in 
 seventeen days. The controversy as to the possibility of such voyages, 
 which was settled by the Great Western and the Sirius, had no reference 
 to the actual safety of such an experiment. During seven years the mails 
 for the Mediterranean had been despatched by means of steamers. The 
 doubt was as to the possibility of stowing in a vessel so large a quantity of 
 coal or other fuel as would enable her to accomplish her voyage across the 
 Atlantic, where there could be no stopping place and no possibility oi 
 taking in new stores. It was found, to the delight of all those who believed 
 in the practicability of the enterprise, that the quantity of fuel which 
 each vessel had on board when she left her port of departure proved amply 
 sufficient for the completion of the voyage. Neither the Sirius nor the 
 Great Western was the first vessel to cross the Atlantic by means of steam 
 propulsion. Nearly twenty years before, a vessel called the Savannah, 
 built at New York, crossed the ocean to Liverpool, and some years later 
 an English-built steamer made several voyages between Holland and the 
 Dutch West Indian colonies as a packet vessel in the service of that 
 Government. Indeed, a voyage had been made round the Cape of Good 
 Hope more lately still by a steam ship. These expeditions, however, had 
 really little or nothing to do with the problem which was solved by the 
 voyages of the Sirius and the Great Western. In the former instance? 
 the steam power was employed merely as an auxiliary. T'le vcEsej made
 
 48 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. cu. IT. 
 
 as much use of her steam propulsion as she could, but she had to rely a 
 good deal on her capacity as a sailer. This was quite a different thing 
 from the enterprise of the Sirius and the Great Western, which was to 
 cross the ocean by steam propulsion and steam propulsion only. It i? 
 evident that so long as the steam power was to be used only as an auxi- 
 liary, it would be impossible to reckon on speed and certainty of arrival 
 The doubt was whether a steamer could carry, with her cargo and passen- 
 gers, fuel enough to serve for the whole of her voyage across the Atlantic. 
 The expeditions of the Sirius and the Great Western settled the whole 
 question. It was never again a matter of controversy. It is enough to 
 say that two years after the Great Western went out from Bristol to New 
 York the Cunard line of steamers was established. The steam communi- 
 cation between Liverpool and New York became thenceforth as regular 
 and as unvarying a part of the business of commerce as the journeys o< 
 the trains on the Great Western Railway between London and Bristol. 
 It was not Bristol which benefited most by the Transatlantic voyages. 
 They made the greatness of Liverpool. Year by year the sceptre of the 
 commercial marine passed away from Bristol to Liverpool. No port in 
 the world can show a line of docks like those of Liverpool. There the 
 stately Mersey flows for miles between the superb and massive granite 
 walls of the enclosures within whose shelter the ships of the world are 
 arrayed as if on parade for the admiration of the traveller who has hitherto 
 been accustomed to the irregular and straggling arrangements of the docks 
 of London or of New York. 
 
 On July 5, 1839, an unusually late period of the year, the Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer brought forward his annual budget. The most impor- 
 tant part of the financial statement, so far as later times are concerned, is 
 set out in a resolution proposed by the finance minister, which perhaps 
 represents the greatest social improvement brought about by legislation in 
 modern times. The Chancellor proposed a resolution declaring that ' it is 
 expedient to reduce the postage on letters to one uniform rate of one penny 
 charged upon every letter of a weight to be hereafter fixed by law ; par- 
 liamentary privileges of franking being abolished and official franking 
 strictly regulated ; this House pledging itself at the same time to make 
 good any deficiency of revenue which may be occasioned by such an 
 alteration in the rates of the existing duties.' Up to this time the rates of 
 postage had been both high and various. They were varying both as to 
 distance, and as to the weight arid even the size or the shape of a letter. 
 The districc or London post was a separate branch of the postal depart- 
 ment ; and the charge for the traiismission of letters was made on a different 
 scale in London from that which prevailed between town and town. The
 
 1839. A .HISTORY Otf OUK UWM 1 IMES. 49 
 
 average postage on every chargeable letter throughout the United Kingdom 
 was sixpence farthing. A letter from London to Brighton cost eight pence ; 
 to Aberdeen one shilling and three pence halfpenny ; to Belfast one shillin;/ 
 and four pence. Nor Avas this all ; for if the letter were written on more 
 than one sheet of paper, it came under the operation of a higher scale of 
 charge. - Members of Parliament had the privilege of franking letters to a 
 certain limited extent : members of the Government had the privilege of 
 franking to an xmlimited extent. It is perhaps as well to mention, for the 
 Bake of being intelligible to all readers in an age which has not, in this 
 country at least, known practically the beauty and liberality of the frank- 
 ing privilege, that it consisted in the right of the privileged person to send 
 his own or any other person's letters through the post free of charge by 
 merely writing his name on the outside. This meant, in plain words, that 
 the letters of the class who could best afford to pay for them went free of 
 charge, and that those who could least afford to pay had to pay double 
 the expense, that is to say, of carrying their own letters and the letters of 
 the privileged and exempt. 
 
 The greatest grievances were felt everywhere because of this absurd 
 system. It had along with its other disadvantages that of encouraging 
 what may be called the smuggling of letters. Everywhere sprang up orga- 
 nisations for the illicit conveyance of correspondence at lower rates than 
 those imposed by the Government. The proprietors of almost every kind 
 of public conveyance are said to have been engaged in this unlawful but 
 certainly not very unnatural or unjustifiable traffic. Five-sixths of all the 
 letters sent between Manchester and London were said to have been con- 
 veyed for years by this process. One great mercantile house was proved 
 to have been in the habit of sending sixty-seven letters by what we may 
 call this underground post-office, for every one on which they paid the 
 Government charges. It was not merely to escape heavy cost that these 
 stratagems were employed. As there was an additional charge when a 
 letter was written on more sheets than one, there was a frequent and 
 almost a constant tampering by officials with the sanctity of sealed letters 
 for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not they ought to be taxed on 
 the higher scale. It was proved that in the years between 1815 and 1835, 
 while the population had increased thirty per cent., and the stage coach 
 duty had increased one hundred and twenty-eight per cent., the Post Office 
 revenues had shown no increase at all. In other countries the postal 
 revenue had been on the increase steadily during that time ; :u the United 
 States the revenue had actually trebled, although then and later the postal 
 system of America was full of faults which at that day only seemed intelli- 
 gible or excusable when placed in comparison with those of our own system. 
 
 VOL. t E
 
 50 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. rv. 
 
 Mr. (afterwards Sir Rowland) Hill is the man to whom this country, and 
 indeed all civilisation, owes the adoption of the cheap and uniform system. 
 His plan has been adopted by every State which professes to have a 
 postal system at all. Mr. Hill belonged to a remarkable family. His 
 father, Thomas Wright Hill, was a teacher, a man of advanced and prac- 
 tical views in popular education, a devoted lover of science, an advocate 
 of civil and religious liberty, and a sort of celebrity in the Birmingham of 
 his day, where he took a bold and active part in trying to defend the 
 house of Dr. Priestley against the mob who attacked it. He had five sons, 
 every one of whom made himself more or less conspicuous as a practical 
 reformer in one path or another. The eldest of the sons was Matthew 
 Davenport Hill, the philanthropic recorder of Birmingham, who did so 
 much for prison reform and for the reclamation of juvenile offenders. 
 The third son was Rowland Hill, the author of the cheap postal system. 
 Rowland Hill when a little weakly child began to show some such pre- 
 cocious love for arithmetical calculations as Pascal showed for mathematics. 
 His favourite amusement as a child was to lie on the hearthrug and count 
 up figures by the hour together. As he grew up he became teacher of 
 mathematics in his father's school. Afterwards he was appointed secre- 
 tary to the South Australian Commission, and rendered much valuable 
 service in the organisation of the colony of South Australia. His early 
 love of masses of figures it may have been which in the first instance 
 turned his attention to the number of letters passing through the Post Office, 
 the proportion they bore to the number of the population, the cost of car- 
 rying them, and the amount which the Post Office authorities charged for the 
 conveyance of a single letter. A picturesque and touching little illustra- 
 tion of the veritable hardships of the existing system seems to have 
 quickened his interest in a reform of it. Miss Martineau thus tells the 
 story : 
 
 ' Coleridge, when a young man, was walking through the Lake dis- 
 trict, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a 
 cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then re- 
 turned it, saying she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. 
 Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, 
 in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the 
 postman was out of sight she showed Coleridge how his money had been 
 wasted, as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There wan 
 an agreeement between her brother and herself that ap long as all went 
 well with him he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter ; 
 and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. Most 
 persons would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell-
 
 !S37. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. .51 
 
 but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the sig- 
 nificance of the fact. It struck Mr. Rowland Hill that there must bo 
 something wrong in a system which drove a brother and Bister to cheating 
 in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare.' 
 
 Mr. Hill gradually worked out for himself a comprehensive scherm of 
 reform. He put it before the world early in 1837. The public were 
 taken by surprise when the plan came before them in the shape of a pamph- 
 let which its author modestly entitled ' Post Office Reform ; its importance 
 and practicability.' The root of Mr. Hill's system lay in the fact, made 
 evident by him beyond dispute, that the actual cost of the conveyance of 
 letters through the post was very trifling, and was but little increased by 
 the distance over which they had to be carried. 
 
 His proposal was therefore that the rates of postage should be dimin- 
 ished to the minimum ; that at the same time the speed of conveyance 
 should be increased, and that there should be much greater frequency of 
 despatch. His principle was, in fact, the very opposite of that which ha(? 
 prevailed in the calculations of the authorities. Their idea was that the 
 higher the charge for letters the greater the return to the revenue. He 
 started on the assumption that the smaller the charge the greater the profit. 
 He therefore recommended the substitution of one uniform charge of one 
 penny the half-ounce, without reference to the distance within the limits 
 of the United Kingdom which the letter had to be carried. The Post 
 Office authorities were at first uncompromising in their opposition to the 
 scheme. The Postmaster-General, Lord Lichfield, said in the House of 
 Lords, that of all the wild and extravagant schemes he had ever heard of, 
 it was the wildest and most extravagant. ' The mails,' he said, ' will have to 
 carry twelve times as much weight, and therefore the charge for transit/ is- 
 sion instead of 100,000/., as now, must be twelve times that amount. The 
 walls of the Post Office would burst, the whole area in which the building 
 stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and the letters.' It 
 is impossible not to be struck by the paradoxical peculiarity of this argu- 
 ment. Because the change would be so much welcomed by the public, 
 Lord Lichfield argued that it ought not to be made. He did not fall back 
 upon the then familiar assertion that the public would not send anything 
 like the number of letters the advocates of the scheme expected. He argued 
 that they would send so many as to make it troublesome for the Post 
 Office authorities to deal with them. In plain words, it would be such 
 an immense accommodation to the population in general, that the officials 
 could not undertake the trouble of carrying it into effect. Another Post 
 Office official, Colonel Maberley, was at all events more liberal. ' My 
 constant language,' he said afterwards, ' to the heads of the departments was 
 
 B 2
 
 52 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. IT. 
 
 This plan we know will fail. It is your duty to take care that no ob- 
 struction is placed in the way of it by the heads of the department, and 
 by the Post Office. The allegation, I have not the least doubt, will be 
 made at a subsequent period, that this plan has failed in consequence of the 
 unwillingness of the Government to carry it into fair execution. It is our 
 duty as servants of the Government to take care that no blame eventually 
 shall fall on the Government through any unwillingness of ours to 
 carry it into proper effect.' It is, perhaps, less surprising that the rou- 
 tine mind of officials should have seen no future but failure for the scheme, 
 when so vigorous and untrammelled a thinker as Sydney Smith spoke with 
 anger and contempt of the fact that ' a million of revenue is given up Ir 
 the nonsensical Penny Post scheme, to please my old, excellent, and 
 universally dissentient friend, Noah Warburton. 1 Mr. Warburton was 
 then member for Bridport, and with Mr. Wallace, another member of 
 Parliament, was very active in supporting and promoting the views of Mr. 
 Hill. ' I admire the Whig Ministry,' Sydney Smith went on to say, ' and 
 think they have done more good things than all the ministries since the 
 Revolution ; but these concessions are sad and unworthy marks of weak- 
 ness, and fill reasonable men with alarm.' 
 
 It will be seen from this remark alone that the Ministry had yielded 
 somewhat more readily than might have been expected to the arguments 
 of Mr. Hill. At the time his pamphlet appeared a commission was actually 
 engaged in inquiring into the condition of the Post Office department. 
 Their attention was drawn to Mr. Hill's plan, and they gave it a careful 
 consideration, and reported in its favour, although the Post Office authorities 
 were convinced that it must involve an unbearable loss of revenue. In 
 Parliament Mr. Wallace, whose name has been already mentioned, moved 
 for a committee to inquire into the whole subject, and especially to examine 
 the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage, in the pamphlet 
 of Mr. Hill. The committee gave the subject a very patient consideration, 
 and at length made a report recommending uniform charges and prepayment 
 by stamps. That part of Mr. Hill's plan which suggested the use of postage 
 stamps was adopted by him on the advice of Mr. Charles Knight. The 
 Government took up the scheme with some spirit and liberality. The 
 revenue that year showed a deficiency, but they determined to run the 
 further risk which the proposal involved. The commercial community 
 had naturally been stirred greatly by the project which promised so much 
 relief and advantage. Sydney Smith was very much mistaken indeed 
 when he fancied that it was only to please his old and excellent friend, 
 Mr. Warburton. that the Ministry gave way to the innovation. Petitions 
 from all the commercial communities were pouring in to support the plan,
 
 183&-40. A IIISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 63 
 
 nnd to ask that at least it should have a fair trial. The Government at, 
 length determined to bring in a bill which should provide for the almost 
 immediate introduction of Mr. Hill's scheme, and for the abolition of the 
 franking system except in the case of official letters actually sent on business 
 directly belonging to her Majesty's service. The bill declared, as an intro- 
 ductory step, that the charge for postage should be at the rate of four pence 
 for each letter under half an ounce in weight, irrespective of distance, 
 within the limits of the United Kingdom. This, however, was to be only 
 a beginning ; for on January 10, 1840, the postage was fixed at the unifoim 
 rate of one penny per letter of not more than half an ounce in weight. The 
 introductory measure was not, of course, carried without opposition in both 
 Houses of Parliament. The Duke of Wellington in his characteristic way 
 declared that he strongly objected to the scheme, but as the Government 
 had evidently set their hearts upon it, he recommended the House of Lords 
 not to offer any opposition to it. In the House of Commons it was opposed 
 by Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Goulburn, both of whom strongly condemned 
 the whole scheme as likely to involve the country in vast loss of revenue. 
 The measure, however, passed into law. Some idea of the effect it haa 
 produced upon the postal correspondence of the country may be gathered 
 from the fact that in 1839, the last year of the heavy postage, the number 
 of letters delivered in Great Britain and Ireland was a little more than 
 eighty-two millions, which included some five millions and a half of franked 
 letters returning nothing to the revenues of the country ; whereas, in 1875, 
 more than a thousand millions of letters were delivered in the United King- 
 dom. The population during the same time has not nearly doubled itself. 
 It has already been remarked that the principle of Sir Rowland Hill's 
 reform has since been put into operation in every civilised country in the 
 world. It may be added that before long we shall in all human probability 
 see an inter-oceanic postage established at a rate as low as people sometimes 
 thought Sir Rowland Hill a madman for recommending as applicable to 
 our inland post. The time is not far distant when a letter will be carried 
 from London to San Francisco, or to Tokio in Japan, at a rate of charge 
 as small as that which made financiers stare and laugh when it was sug- 
 gested as profitable remuneration for carrying a letter from London to the 
 towns of Sussex or Hertfordshire. The ' Penny Post,' let it be said, is an 
 older institution than that which Sir Rowland Hill introduced. A penny 
 post for the conveyance of letters had been set up in London so long ago 
 as 1683 ; and it was adopted or annexed by the Government some years 
 after. An effort was even made to set up a halfpenny post in London, in 
 opposition lo the official penny post, in 1708; but the Government soon 
 crushed this vexatious and intrusive rival. In 1738 Dr. Johnson writes
 
 54 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. IT. 
 
 to Mr. Cave ' to entreat that you will be pleased to inform me, by the 
 penny post, whether you resolve to print the poem.' After a while the 
 Government changed their penny post to a twopenny post, and gradually 
 made a distinction between district and other postal systems, and contrived 
 to swell the price for deliveries of all kinds. Long before even this time 
 of the penny post, the old records of the city of Bristol contain an account 
 of the payment of one penny for the carriage of letters to London. It need 
 hardly be explained, however, that a penny in that time, or even in 1683, 
 was a payment of very different value indeed from the modest sum which 
 Sir Rowland Hill was successful in establishing. The ancient penny post 
 resembled ^he modern penny post only in name. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CHARTISM. 
 
 IT cannot, however, be said that all the omens under which the new 
 Queen's reign opened at home were as auspicious as the coincidences 
 which made it contemporary with the first chapters of these new and 
 noble developments in the history of science and invention. On the con- 
 trary, it began amid many grim and unpromising conditions in our social 
 affairs. The winter of 1837-8 was one of unusual severity and distress. 
 There would have been much discontent and grumbling in any case among 
 the class described by French writers as the proletaire ; but the complaints 
 were aggravated by a common belief that the young Queen was wholly 
 under the influence of a frivolous and selfish minister, who occupied her 
 with amusements while the poor were starving. It does not appear that 
 there was at any time the slightest justification for such a belief; but it 
 prevailed among the working classes and the poor very generally, and 
 added to the sufferings of genuine want the bitterness of imaginary wrong. 
 Popular education was little looked after ; so far as the State was con- 
 cerned, might be said not to be looked after at all. The laws of political 
 economy were as yet only within the appreciation of a few, who were 
 regarded not uncommonly, because of their theories, somewhat as phreno- 
 logists or mesmerists might be looked on in a more enlightened time. 
 Some writers have made a great deal of the case of Thorn and his disciples 
 as evidence of the extraordinary ignorance that prevailed. Thorn was a 
 broken-down brewer, and in fact a madman, who had for some time been 
 going about in Canterbury and other parts of Kent bedizened in fantastic 
 costu:ne, and styling himself at first Sir William Courtenay, of Powder-
 
 1837 H. A. HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 55 
 
 bam Castle, Knight of Malta, King of Jerusalem, king of the gipsy races, 
 and we know not what else. He announced himself as a great political 
 reformer, and lor awhile he succeeded in getting many to believe in and 
 support him. He was afterwards confined for some time in a lunatic 
 asylum, and when he came out he presented himself to the ignorant 
 peasantry in the character of a second Messiah. He found many follow- 
 ers and believers again, among a humbler class indeed than those whom lie 
 had formerly won over. Much of his influence over the poor Kentish 
 labourers was due to his denunciations of the new Poor Law, which was 
 then popularly hated and feared with an almost insane intensity of feeling. 
 Thorn told them he had come to regenerate the whole world, and also to 
 save his followers from the new Poor Law ; and the latter announcement 
 commended the former. He assembled a crowd of his supporters, and 
 undertook to lead them to an attack on Canterbury. With his own hand 
 he shot dead a policeman who endeavoured to oppose his movements, 
 exactly as a saviour of society of bolder pretensions and greater success 
 did at Boulogne not long after. Two companies of soldiers came out from 
 Canterbury to disperse the rioters. The officer in command was shot 
 dead by Thorn. Thorn's r ollowers then charged the unexpecting soldiers 
 so fiercely that for a moment there was some confusion ; but the second 
 company fired a volley which stretched Thorn and several of his adherents 
 lifeless on the field. That was an end of the rising. Several of Thorn's 
 followers were afterwards tried for murder, convicted and sentenced ; but 
 some pity was felt for their ignorance and their delusion, and they were 
 not consigned to death. Long after the fall of their preposterous hero 
 and saint, many of Thorn's disciples believed that he would return from 
 the grave to carry out the promised work of his mission. All this was 
 lamentable, but could hardly be regarded as specially characteristic of the 
 early years of the present reign. The Thorn delusion was not much more 
 absurd than the Tichborne mania of a later day. Down to our own time 
 there are men and women among the Social Democrats of cultured Ger- 
 many who still cherish the hope that their idol Ferdinand Lassalle will 
 come back from the dead to lead and guide them. 
 
 But there were political and social dangers in the opening of the pre- 
 sent reign more serious than any that could have been conjured up by a 
 crazy man in a fantastic dress. There were delusions having deeper roots 
 and showing a more inviting shelter than any that a religious fanatic of 
 the vulgar type could cause to spring up in our society. 
 
 Only a few weeks after the coronation of the Queen a great Radical 
 meeting was held in Birmingham. A manifesto was adopted there which 
 afterward.-- came to be known as the Chartist petition. With that movement
 
 56 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. v. 
 
 Chartism began to be one of the most disturbing influences of the political 
 life of the country. It is a movement which, although its influence may 
 now be said to have wholly passed away, well deserves to have its history 
 fully written. For ten years it agitated England. It sometimes seemed 
 to threaten an actual uprising of all the proletaire against what were then 
 the political and social institutions of the country. It might have been a 
 very serious danger if the State had been involved in any external diffi- 
 culties. It was backed by much genuine enthusiasm, passion, and intelli- 
 gence. It appealed strongly and naturally to whatever there was of dis- 
 content among the working classes. It afforded a most acceptable and 
 convenient means by which ambitious politicians of the self-seeking order 
 could raise themselves into temporary importance. Its fierce and fitful 
 flame went out at last under the influence of the clear, strong and steady 
 light of political reform and education.- The one great lesson it teaches is, 
 that political agitation lives and is formidable only by virtue of what is 
 reasonable in its demands. Thousands of ignorant and miserable men all 
 over the country joined the Chartist agitation who cared nothing about the 
 substantial value of its political claims. They were poor, they were o^er- 
 worked, they were badly paid, their lives were altogether wretched. They 
 got into their heads some wild idea that the People's Charter would give 
 them better food and wages and lighter work if it were obtained, and 
 that for that very reason the aristocrats and the officials would not grant it. 
 No political concessions could really have satisfied these men. If the 
 Charter had been granted in 1838, they would no doubt have been as dis- 
 satisfied as ever in 1839. But the discontent of these poor creatures 
 would have brought with it little danger to the State if it had not become 
 part of the support of an organisation which could show some sound and 
 good reason for the demands it made. The moment that the clear and 
 practical political grievances were dealt with the organisation melted 
 away. Vague discontent, however natural and excusable it may be, is 
 only formidable in politics when it helps to swell the strength and the 
 numbers of a crowd which calls for some reform that can be made and is 
 withheld. One of the vulgarest fallacies of statecraft is to declare that it 
 is of no use granting the reforms which would satisfy reasonable demands, 
 because there are still unreasonable agitators whcm these will not satisfy. 
 Get the reasonable men on your side, and you need not fear the unreason- 
 able. This is the lesson taught to statesmen by the Chartist agitation. 
 
 A funeral oration over Chartism was pronounced by Sir John Camp- 
 bell, then Attorney-General, afterwards Lord Chief Justice Campbell, at 
 a public dinner at Edinburgh on Octob- r 24, 1839. He spoke at some 
 length and with much complacency of Chartism as an agitation which had
 
 1839. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 57 
 
 passed away. Some ten days afterwards occurred the most formidable 
 outburst of Chartism that had been known up to that time, and Chartism 
 continued to be an active and a disturbing influence in England for nearly 
 ten years after. If Sir John Campbell had told his friends and constituents 
 at the Edinburgh dinner that the influence of Chartism was just about to 
 make itself really felt, he would have shown himself a somewhat more acute 
 politician than we now understand him to be. Seldom has a public man 
 setting up to be a political authority made a worse hit than he did in that 
 memorable declaration,' Campbell was indeed only a clever shrewd lawyer 
 of the hard and narrow class. He never made any pretension to states- 
 manship, or even to great political knowledge; and his unfortunate blunder 
 might be passed over without notice were it not that it illustrates fairly 
 enough the manner in which men of better information and judgment 
 than he were at that time in the habit of disposing of all inconvenient 
 political problems. The Attorney-General was aware that there had been 
 a few riots and a few arrests, and that the law had been what he would call 
 vindicated ; and as he had no manner of sympathy with the motives 
 which could lead men to distress themselves and their friends about 
 imaginary charters, he assumed that there was an end of the matter. It 
 did not occur to him to ask himself whether there might not be some 
 underlying causes to explain if not to excuse the agitation that just 
 then began to disturb the country, and that continued to disturb it for so 
 many years. Even if he had inquired into the subject, it is not likely that he 
 would have come to any wiser conclusion about it. The dramatic instinct, 
 if we may be allowed to call it so, which enables a man to put himself for 
 the moment into the condition and mood of men entirely unlike himself 
 in feelings and conditions, is an indispensable element of real statesman- 
 ship ; but it is the rarest of all gifts among politicians of the second order. 
 If Sir John Campbell had turned his attention to the Chartist question, he 
 would only have found that a number of men, for the most part poor and 
 ignorant, were complaining of grievances where he could not for himself see 
 any substantial grievances at all. That would have been enough for him. 
 If a solid, wealthy and rising lawyer could not see any cause for grum- 
 bling, he would have made up his mind that no reasonable persons worthy 
 the consideration of sensible legislators would continue to grumble after 
 they had been told by those in authority that it was their business to keep 
 quiet. But if he had, on the other hand, looked with the light of sympa- 
 thetic intelligence, of that dramatic instinct which has just been mentioned, 
 at the condition of the classes among whom Chartism was then rife, he 
 would have seen that it was not likely the agitation could bo put down by 
 a fb'.v prosecutions and a few arrests, and the censure of a prosperous
 
 58 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cit. r, 
 
 Attorney -General. He would have seen that Chartism was not a cause but 
 d consequence. The intelligence of a very ordinary man who approached 
 the question in an impartial mood might have seen that Chartism was the 
 expression of a vague discontent with very positive grievances and evils. 
 
 We have in our time outlived the days of political abstractions. The 
 catch-words which thrilled our forefathers with emotion on one side or 
 the other fail with hardly any meaning on our ears. We smile at such 
 phrases as ' the rights of man.' We hardly know what is meant by talking 
 of 'the people' as the words were used long ago when 'the people' was 
 understood to mean a vast mass of wronged persons who had no representa- 
 tion and were oppressed by privilege and the aristocracy. We seldom talk 
 of ' liberty ; ' anyone venturing to found a theory or even a declamation 
 on some supposed deprival of liberty would soon find himself in the awk- 
 ward position of being called on to give a scientific definition of what he 
 understood liberty to be. He would be as much puzzled as were certain 
 English working men, who desiring to express to Mr. John Stuart Mill 
 their sympathy with what they called in the slang of continental democracy 
 ' the Revolution,' were calmly bidden by the great Liberal thinker to ask 
 themselves what they meant by 'the Revolution,' which revolution, what 
 revolution, and why they sympathised with it. But perhaps we are all a 
 little too apt to think that because these abstractions have no living meaning 
 now, they never had any living meaning at all. They convey no manner 
 of clear idea in England now, but it does not by any means follow that 
 they never conveyed any such idea. The phrase which Mr. Mill so properly 
 condemned when he found it in the mouths of English working men had 
 a very intelligible and distinct meaning when it first came to be used in 
 France and throughout the Continent. ' The Revolution ' expressed a clear 
 reality, as recognisable by the intelligence of all who heard it as the name 
 of Free Trade or of Ultramontanism to men of our time. ' The Revolution ' 
 was the principle which was asserting all over Europe the overthrow of 
 the old absolute power of kings, and it described it just as well as any 
 word could do. It is meaningless in our day for the very reason that it 
 was full of meaning then. So it was with ' the people ' and ' the rights of 
 the people ' and the 'rights of labour/ and all the other grandiloquent 
 phrases which seem to us so empty and so meaningless now. They are 
 empty and meaningless at the present hour ; but they have no application 
 now chiefly because they had application then. 
 
 The Reform Bill of 1832 had been necessarily and perhaps naturally 
 a class measure. It had done great things for the constitutional system of 
 England. It had averted a revolution which without some such cincession 
 would probably have been inevitable. It had settled for ever the question
 
 1831 2. A HISTORY OF OUR OW TIMES. 59 
 
 which was so fiercely and so gravely debated during the discussions of the 
 reform years, whether the English Constitution is or is not based upon a 
 system of popular representation. To many at present it may seem hardly 
 credible that sane men could have denied the existence of the representative 
 principle. But during the debates on the great Reform Bill such a denial 
 was the strong point of many of the leading opponents of the measure, in- 
 cluding the Duke of Wellington himself. The principle of the Constitution, 
 it was soberly argued, is that the Sovereign invites whatever communities or 
 interests he thinks fit to send in persons to Parliament to take counsel with 
 him on the affairs of the nation. This idea was got rid of by the Reform 
 Bill. That bill abolished fifty-six nomination or rotten boroughs, and took 
 away half the representation from thirty others; it disposed of the seats thus 
 obtained by giving sixty-five additional representatives to the counties, and 
 conferring the right of returning members on Manchester, Leeds, Birming- 
 ham, and some thirty-nine large and prosperous towns which had previously 
 had no representation ; while, as Lord John Russell said in his speech when 
 he introduced the bill in March 1831, 'a ruined mound' sent two repre- 
 sentatives to Parliament ; ' three niches in a stone wall ' sent two represen- 
 tatives to Parliament ; ' a park where no houses were to be seen ' sent two 
 representatives to Parliament. The bill introduced a 1 0/. household quali- 
 fication for boroughs, and extended the county franchise to leaseholders 
 and copyholders. But it left the working classes almost altogether out of 
 the franchise. Not merely did it confer no political emancipation on 
 them, but it took away in many places the peculiar franchises which 
 made the working men voters. There were communities such, for ex- 
 ample, as that of Preston, in Lancashire where the system of franchise 
 existing created something like universal suffrage. All this was smoothed 
 away, if such an expression may be used, by the Reform Bill. In truth' 
 the Reform Bill broke down the monopoly which the aristocracy and 
 landed classes had enjoyed, and admitted the middle classes to a share of 
 the law-making power. The representation was divided between the 
 aristocracy and the middle class, instead of being, as before, the exclusive 
 possession of the former. 
 
 The working class, in the opinion of many of their ablest and most 
 influential representatives, were not merely left out but shouldered out. 
 This was all the more sxasperating because the excitement and agitation 
 by the strength of which the Reform Bill was carried in the teeth of so 
 much resistance were kept up by the working men. There was besides, at 
 the time of the Reform Bill, a very high degree of what may be called the 
 temperature of the French Revolution still heating the senses and influencing 
 the judgment even of the aristocratic leaders of the movement. What
 
 HO A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. v 
 
 RicLter calls the ' seed-grains ' of the revolutionary doctrines had been 
 blown abroad so widely that they rested in some of the highest as well as 
 in most of the lowliest places. Some of the Eeform leaders, Lord Durham 
 for instance, were prepared to go much farther in the way of Radicalism 
 than at a later period Mr. Cobden or Mr. Bright would have gone. There 
 was more than once a sort of appeal to the working men of the country 
 which, however differently it may have been meant, certainly sounded in 
 their ears as if it were an intimation that in the event of the bill being 
 resisted too long it might be necessary to try what the strength of a popular 
 uprising could do. Many years after, in the defence of the Irish state 
 prisoners at Clonmel, the counsel who pleaded their cause insisted that 
 they had warrant for their conduct in certain proceedings which were in 
 preparation during the Reform agitation. He talked with undisguised 
 significance of the teacher being in the Ministry and the pupils in the 
 dock ; and quoted Captain Macheath to the effect that if laws were made 
 equally for every degree, there might even then be rare company on 
 Tyburn tree. It is not necessary to attach too much importance to 
 assertions of this kind, or to accept them as sober contributions to history. 
 But they are very instructive as a means of enabling us to understand the 
 feeling of soreness which remained in the minds of large masses of the 
 population when after the passing of the Reform Bill they found them- 
 selves left out in the cold. Rightly or wrongly they believed that their 
 strength had been kept in reserve or in terrorem to secure the carrying of 
 the Reform Bill, and that when it was carried they were immediately 
 thrown over by those whom they had thus helped to pass it. Therefore 
 at the time when the young Sovereign ascended the throne, the working 
 classes in all the large towns wers in a state of profound disappointment 
 and discontent, almost indeed of disaffection. Chartism was beginning to 
 succeed to the Reform agitation. The leaders who had come from the 
 ranks of the aristocracy had been discarded or had withdrawn. In some 
 cases they had withdrawn in perfect good faith, believing sincerely that 
 they had done the work which they undertook to do, and that that was all 
 the country required. Men drawn more immediately from the working 
 class itself, or who had in some way been dropped down by a class higher 
 in tha social scale, took up the popular leadership now. 
 
 Chartism may be said to have sprung definitively into existence in 
 consequence of the formal declarations of the leaders of the Liberal party 
 in Parliament that they did not intend to push reform any farther. At 
 the opening of the first Parliament of Queen Victoria's reign tne question 
 was brought to a test. A Radical member of the House of Commons 
 moved as an amendment to the address ?. resolution declaring in favour
 
 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 61 
 
 of the ballot and of shorter duration of Parliaments. Only twenty 
 members voted for it; and Lord John Russell declared distinetly against 
 all such attempts to reopen the Reform question. It was impossible that 
 this declaration should not be received with disappointment and anger by 
 great masses of the people. They had been in the full assurance that the 
 Reform Bill itself was only the means by which greater changes were to 
 be brought about. Lord John Russell said in the House of Commons that 
 to push Reform any farther then would be a breach of faith towards those 
 who helped him to carry it. A great many outside Parliament not un- 
 naturally regarded the refusal to go any farther as a breach of faith towards 
 them on the part of the Liberal leaders. Lord John Russell was right from 
 his point of view. It would have been impossible to carry the Reform 
 movement any farther just then. In a country like ours where interests 
 are so nicely balanced, it must always happen that a forward movement 
 in politics is followed by a certain reaction. The parliamentary leaders 
 in Parliament were already beginning to feel the influence of this law of 
 our political growth. It would have been hopeless to attempt to get the 
 upper and middle classes at such a time to consent to any further changes 
 of considerable importance. But the feeling of those who had helped so 
 materially to bring about the Reform movement was at least intelligible 
 when they found that its effects were to stop just short of the measures 
 which aloue could have any direct influence on their political position. 
 
 A conference was held almost immediately between a few of the 
 Liberal members of Parliament who professed Radical opinions and some 
 of the leaders of the working men. At this conference the programme, or 
 what Avas always afterwards known as ' the Charter,' was agreed upon and 
 drawn up. The name of ' Charter ' appears to have been given to it for 
 the first time by O'Connell. ' There's your Charter,' he said to the secre- 
 tary of the Working Men's Association ; ' agitate for it, and never be 
 content with anything less.' It is a great thing accomplished in political 
 agitation to have found a telling name. A name is almost as important 
 for a new agitation as for a new novel. The title of ' The People's 
 Charter ' would of itself have launched the movement. 
 
 Quietly studied now, the People's Charter does not seem a very for- 
 midable document. There is little smell of gunpowder about it. Its 
 ' points,' as they were called, were six. Manhood Suffrage came first. It 
 was then called universal suffrage, but it only meant manhood suffrage, 
 for the promoters of the movement had not the slightest idea of insisting 
 on the franchise for women. The second was Annual Parliaments. Vote 
 by Ballot was the third. Abolition of the Property Qualification (then 
 and for many years after required for the election of a member to Par Ha-
 
 62 A HISTOEY OF OUH OWN TIMES. CH. v 
 
 in ant) was the fourth. The Payment of Members was the fifth; and the 
 Division of the Country into Equal Electoral Districts, the sixth of the 
 famous points. Of these proposals some, it will be seen, were perfectly 
 reasonable. Not one was so absolutely unreasonable as to be outside the 
 range of fair and quiet discussion among practical politicians. Three of 
 the points half, that is to say, of the whole number have already been 
 made part of our constitutional system. The existing franchise may be 
 virtually regarded as manhood suffrage. We have for years been voting 
 by means of a written paper dropped in a ballot-box. The property 
 qualification for members of Parliament could hardly be said to have been 
 abolished. Such a word seems far too grand and dignified to describe the 
 fate that befell it. We should rather say that it was extinguished by its 
 own absurdity and viciousness. It never kept out of Parliament any 
 person legally disqualified, and it was the occasion of incessant tricks and 
 devices which Avould surely have been counted disreputable and disgraceful 
 to those who engaged in them, but that the injustice and folly of the sys- 
 tem generated a sort of false public conscience where it was concerned, 
 and made people think it as lawful to cheat it, as at one time the most 
 respectable persons in private life thought it allowable to cheat the 
 revenue and wear smuggled lace or drink smuggled brandy. The pro- 
 posal to divide the country into equal electoral districts is one which can 
 hardly yet be regarded as having come to any test. But it is almost 
 certain that sooner or later some alteration of our present system in that 
 direction will be adopted. Of the two other points of the Charter, the 
 payment of members may be regarded as decidedly objectionable ; and 
 that for yearly parliaments as embodying a proposition which would make 
 public life an almost insufferable nuisance to those actively concerned in it. 
 But neither of these two proposals would be looked upon in our time as 
 outside the range of legitimate political discussion. Indeed, the difficulty 
 anyone engaged in their advocacy would find just now would be in getting 
 any considerable body of listeners to take the slightest interest in the 
 argument either for or against them. 
 
 The Chartists might be roughly divided into three classes the political 
 Chartists, the social Chartists, and the Chartists of vague discontent who 
 joined the movement because they were wretched and felt angry. The 
 first were the regular political agitators who wanted a wider popular re- 
 presentation ; the second were chiefly led to the movement by their hatred 
 of the ' bread-tax.' These two classes were perfectly clear as to what they 
 wanted: some of their demands were just and reasonable; none of them 
 were without the sphere of rational and peaceful controversy. The dis- 
 ciples ,of mere disocntent naturally swerved alternately to the side of those
 
 1838. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 63 
 
 leaders or sections who talked loudest and fiercest against the law makers 
 and the constituted authorities. Chartism soon split itself into two general 
 divisions the moral force and the physical force Chartism. Nothing can 
 be more unjust than to represent the leaders and promoters of the move- 
 ment as mere factious and self-seeking demagogues. Some of them were 
 men of great ability and eloquence ; some were impassioned young poets 
 drawn from the class whom Kingsley has described in his ' Alton Locke ; ' 
 some were men of erlucation ; many were earnest and devoted fanatics; 
 and, so far as we can judge, all, or nearly all, were sincere. Even the man 
 who did the movement most harm, and who made himself: most odious to 
 all reasonable outsiders, the once famous, now forgotten, Feargus O'Connor, 
 appears to have been sincere and to have personally lost more than he 
 gained by his Chartism. Four or five years after the collapse of what 
 may be called the active Chartist agitation, a huge white-headed vacuous- 
 eyed man was to be seen of mornings wandering through the arcades of: 
 Covent Garden Market, looking at the fruits and flowers, occasionally 
 taking up a flower, smelling at it, and piitting it down with a smile of 
 infantile satisfaction ; a man who might have reminded observers of Mr. 
 Dick in Dickens's ' David Copperfield ; ' and this was the once renowned, 
 once dreaded and detested Feargus O'Connor. For some time before his 
 death his reason had wholly deserted him. Men did not know at first in 
 the House of Commons the meaning of the odd pranks which Feargus was 
 beginning to play there to the bewilderment of the great assembly. At 
 last it was seen that the fallen leader of Chartism was a hopeless madman. 
 It is hardly to be doubted that insanity had long been growing on him, 
 and that some at least of his political follies and extravagances were the 
 result of an increasing disorder of the brain. In his day he had been the 
 very model for a certain class of demagogue. He was of commanding 
 presence, great stature, and almost gigantic strength. lie had education; 
 he had mixed in good society ; he belonged to an old family, and indeed 
 boasted his descent from a line of Irish kings, not without some ground 
 for the claim. He had been a man of some fashion at one time and had 
 led a life of wild dissipation in his early years. He had a kind of eloquence 
 which told with immense power on a mass of half-ignorant hearers ; and 
 indeed men who had no manner of liking for him or sympathy with his 
 doctrines have declared that he was the most effective mob orator they had 
 ever heard. He was ready, if needs were, to fight his way single-handed 
 through a whole mass of Tory opponents at a contested election. Thomas 
 Cooper, the venerable poet of Chartism, has given an amusing description, 
 in his Autobiography, of Feargus O'Connor, who was then his hero, leaping 
 from a waggon at a Nottingham election into the midst of a crowd of Tcry
 
 tH A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. v. 
 
 butchers, and with only two stout Chartist followers fighting his way 
 through all opposition, ' flooring the butchers like ninepins.' ' Once,' saya 
 Mr. Cooper, ' the Tory lambs fought off all who surrounded him and got 
 him down, and my heart quaked for I thought they would kill him. 
 But in a very few moments his red head emerged again from the rough 
 human billows, and he was fighting his way as before.' 
 
 There were many men in the movement of a nobler moral nature than 
 poor huge wild Feargus O'Connor. There were men like Thomas Cooper 
 himself, devoted, impassioned, full of poetic aspiration and no scant measure 
 of poetic inspiration as well. Henry Vincent was a man of unimpeachable 
 character and of some ability, an effective popular speaker, who has since 
 maintained in a very unpretending way a considerable reputation. Ernest 
 Jones was as sincere and self-sacrificing a man as ever joined a sinking 
 cause. He had proved his sincerity more in deed than word. His talents 
 only fell short of that height which might claim to be regarded as genius. 
 His education was that of a scholar and a gentleman. Many men of educa- 
 tion and ability were drawn into sympathy if not into actual co-operation 
 with the Chartists by a conviction that some of their claims were well- 
 founded, and that the grievances of the working classes, which were terrible 
 to contemplate, were such as a Parliament better representing all classes 
 would be able to remedy. Some of these men have since made for them- 
 selves an honourable name in Parliament and out of it ; some of them 
 have risen to high political position. It is necessary to read such a book 
 as Thomas Cooper's Autobiography to understand how genuine was the 
 poetic and political enthusiasm which was at the heart of the Chartist 
 movement, and how bitter was the suffering which drove into its ranks so 
 many thousands of stout working men who, in a country like England, 
 might well have expected to be able to live by the hard work they were 
 only too willing to do. One must read the Anti-Corn-Law Ehymes of 
 1 Ebenezer Elliott to understand how the ' bread tax ' became indentified in 
 the minds of the very best of the working class, and identified justly, with 
 the system of political and economical legislation which was undoubtedly 
 kept up, although not of conscious purpose, for the benefit of a class. In 
 the minds of too many, the British Constitution meant hard work and 
 half-starvation. 
 
 A whole literature of Chartist newspapers sprang up to advocate the 
 cause. The Northern Star, owned and conducted by Feargus O'Connor, 
 was the most popular and influential of them; but every great town had 
 its Chartist press. Meetings were held at which sometimes very violent 
 language was employed. It began to be the practice to hold torchlight 
 meetings at night, and many men went armed to these, and open clamour
 
 183-40. A H1ST011Y OF OUR OWN TIMES. 65 
 
 was made by the wilder of the Chartists for an appeal to arms. A for- 
 midable riot took place in Birmingham, where the authorities endeavoured 
 to put down a Chartist meeting. Ebenezer Elliott and other sensible sym- 
 pathisers endeavoured to open the eyes of the more extreme Chartists to 
 the folly of all schemes for measures of violence ; but for the time the 
 more violent a speaker was, the better chance he had of becoming popular. 
 Efforts were made at times to bring about a compromise with the middle- 
 class Liberals and the Anti-Corn-Law leaders; but all such attempts 
 proved failures. The Chartists would not give up their Charter ; many 
 of them would not renounce the hope of seeing it carried by force. The 
 Government began to prosecute some of the orators and leaders of the 
 Charter movement; and some of these were convicted, imprisoned, and 
 treated with great severity. Henry Vincent's imprisonment at Newport, 
 in Wales, was the occasion of an attempt at rescue which bore a very close 
 resemblance indeed to a scheme of organised and armed rebellion. 
 
 Newport had around it a large mining population, and the miners were 
 nearly all physical force Chartists. It was arranged among them to march 
 in three divisions to a certain rendezvous, and when they had formed a 
 junction there, which Avas to be two hours after midnight, to march into 
 Newport, attack the gaol, and effect the release of Vincent and other 
 prisoners. The attempt was to be under the chief command of Mr. Frost, 
 a trader of Newport, who had been a magistrate, but was deprived of the 
 commission of the peace for violent political speeches a man of respectable 
 character and conduct up to that time. This was on November 4, 1839. 
 There was some misunderstanding and delay, as almost invariably happens 
 in such enterprises, and the divisions of the little army did not effect their 
 junction in time. When they entered Newport, they found the authorities 
 fully prepared to meet them. Frost entered the town at the head of one 
 division only, another following him at some interval. The third was 
 nowhere, as far as the object of the enterprise was concerned. A conflict 
 took place between the rioters and the soldiery and police, and the rioters 
 were dispersed with a loss of some ten killed and fifty wounded. In their 
 night they encountered some of the other divisions coming up to the enter- 
 prise all too late. Nothing was more remarkable than the courage shown 
 by the mayor of Newport, the magistrates, and the little body of soldiers. 
 The mayor, Mr. Phillips, received two gunshot wounds. Frost was arrested 
 next day, with some of his colleagues. The trials began December 31, 1839, 
 and ended January 13, 1840. The charge was one of high treason. There 
 did really appear ground enough to suppose that the expedition led by Frost 
 was not merely to rescue Vincent, but to set going the great rebellious 
 movement of which the physical force Chartists had long been talking. 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 66 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. v. 
 
 The Chartists appear at first to have numbered some ten thousand twenty 
 thousand indeed, according to other accounts and they were armed with 
 guns, pikes, swords, pickaxes and bludgeons. If the delay and misimder- 
 standing had not taken place, and they had arrived at their rendezvous at 
 the appointed time, the attempt might have led to very calamitous results. 
 The jury found Frost and two of his companions, Williams and Jones, 
 guilty of high treason, and they were sentenced to death ; the sentence, 
 however, was commuted to one of transportation for life. Even this was 
 afterwards relaxed, and when some years had passed away, and Chartism 
 had ceased to be a disturbing influence, Frost was allowed to return to 
 England, where he found that a new generation had grown up, and that 
 he was all but forgotten. In the meantime the Corn-Law agitation had 
 been successful; the year of revolutions had passed harmlessly over; 
 Feargus O'Connor's day was done. 
 
 But the trial and conviction of Frost, Williams, and Jones did not put 
 a stop to the Chartist agitation. On the contrary, that agitation seemed 
 rather to wax and strengthen and grow broader because of the attempt at 
 Newport, and its consequences. Thomas Cooper, for example, had never 
 attended a Chartist meeting, nor known anything of Chartism beyond what 
 he read in the newspapers, until after the conviction of Frost and his com- 
 panions. There was no lack of what were called energetic measures on 
 the part of the Government. The leading Chartists all over the country 
 were prosecuted and tried, literally by hundreds. In most cases they were 
 convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The imprisonment 
 served rather to make the Chartist leaders popular, and to advertise the 
 movement, than to accomplish any purpose the Government had at heart. 
 They helped to make the Government very unpopular. The working 
 classes grew more and more bitter against the Whigs, who they said had 
 professed Liberalism only to gain their own ends, and were really at heart 
 less Liberal than the Tories. Now and then an imprisoned representative 
 of the Chartist movement got to the end of his period of sentence, and 
 came out of durance. He was a hero all over again, and his return to 
 public life was the signal fur fresh demonstrations of Chartism. At the 
 general election of 18-11, the vast majority of the Chartists, acting on the 
 Advice of some of their more extreme leaders, threw all their support into 
 :he cause of the Tories, and so helped the downfall of the Melbourne 
 Administration. 
 
 Wide and almost universal discontent among the working classes in 
 town and country still helped to swell the Chartist ranks. The weavers 
 and stockingers in some of the manufacturing towns were miserably poor. 
 Wages were low everywhere. In the agricultural districts the complaints
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKH. 07 
 
 against the operation of the now Poor Law were vehement and passionate; 
 and although they were unjust in principle and sustained by monstrous 
 exaggerations of statement, they were not the less potent as recruiting 
 agents for Chartism. There was a profound distrust of the middle class 
 and their leaders. The Anti-Corn-Law agitation which was then springing 
 up, and which, one might have thought, must find its most strenuous sup- 
 port among the poor artisans of the towns, was regarded with deep disgust 
 bv some of the Chartists, and with downright hostility by others. A very 
 temperate orator of the Chartists put the feeling of himself and his fellows 
 in clear terms. ' We do not object to the repeal of the Corn Laws,' lie 
 said ; ' on the contrary. When we get the Charter we will repeal the 
 Corn Laws and all the bad laws. But if you give up your agitation for 
 the Charter to help the Free Traders, they will never help you to get the 
 Charter. Don't be deceived by the middle classes again ! You helped 
 them to get the Reform Bill, and where are the fine promises they made 
 you ? Don't listen to their humbug any more. Stick to your Charter. 
 Without your votes you are veritable slaves.' The Chartists believed 
 themselves abandoned by their natural leaders. All manner of socialist 
 doctrines began to creep in among them. Wild and infidel opinions were 
 proclaimed by many. Thomas Cooper tells one little anecdote which he 
 says fairly illustrates the feeling of many of the fiercer spirits among the 
 artisan Chartists in some of the towns. He and his friends were holding 
 a meeting one day in Leicester. A poor religious stockinger said : ' Let 
 us be patient a little longer; surely God Almighty will help us soon.' 
 1 Talk to us no more about thy Goddle Mighty,' was the fierce cry that 
 came in reply from one of the audience ; ' there isn't one ! If there was 
 one, he wouldn't let us suffer as we do ! ' About the same time a poor 
 stockinger rushed into Cooper's house, and throwing himself wildly on 
 a chair, exclaimed, ' I wish they would hang me. I have lived on cold 
 potatoes that were given me these two days, and this morning I've eaten a 
 raw potato for sheer hunger. Give me a bit of bread and a cup of coffee 
 or I shall drop.' Thomas Cooper's remark about this time is very in- 
 telligible and simple. It tells a long clear story about Chartism. ' How 
 fierce,' he says, ' my discourses became now in the Marketplace on Sunday 
 evenings ! My heart often burned with indignation I knew not how to 
 express. I began from sheer sympathy to feel a tendency to glide into the 
 depraved thinking of some of the stronger but coarser spirits among the 
 men.' 
 
 So the agitation went on. We need not follow it through all its 
 incidents. It took in some places the form of industrial strikes ; in others, 
 of socialistic assemblages. Its fanaticism had in many instances a strong 
 
 F '2
 
 68 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. T. 
 
 flavour of nobleness and virtue. Some men under the influence of thought- 
 ful leaders pledged themselves to total abstinence from intoxicating drinks, 
 in the full belief that the agitation would never succeed until the working 
 classes had proved themselves by their self-control to be worthy of the 
 gift of freedom. In other instances, as has been already remarked, the 
 disappointment and despair of the people took the form of infidelity. There 
 were many riots and disturbances ; none, indeed, of so seemingly rebellious 
 a nature as that of Frost and his companions, but many serious enough to 
 spread great alarm and to furnish fresh occasion for Government prosecu- 
 tions and imprisonments. Some of the prisoners seem to have been really 
 treated with a positively wanton harshness and even cruelty. Thomas 
 Cooper's account of his own sufferings in prison is painful to read. It is 
 not easy to understand what good purpose any Government could have 
 supposed the prison authorities were serving by the unnecessary degrada- 
 tion and privation of men who, whatever their errors, were conspicuously 
 and transparently sincere and honest. 
 
 It is clear that at that time the Chartists, who represented the bulk of 
 the artisan class in most of the large towns, did in their very hearts believe 
 that England was ruled for the benefit of aristocrats and millionaires who 
 were absolutely indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. It is equally clear 
 that most of what are called the ruling class did really believe the English 
 working men who joined the Chartist movement to be a race of fierce 
 unmanageable and selfish communists who, if they were allowed their own 
 way for a moment, would prove themselves determined to overthrow throne, 
 altar, and all established securities of society. An ignorant panic prevailed 
 on both sides. England was indeed divided then, as Mr. Disraeli's novel 
 described it, into two nations, the rich and the poor, in towns at least ; 
 and each hated and feared the other with all that unthinking hate and fear 
 which hostile nations are capable of showing even amid all the influences 
 of civilisation. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 QUESTION DE JUPONS. 
 
 MEANWHILE things were looking ill with the Melbourne Ministry. Sir 
 Robert Peel was addressing great meetings of his followers, and declaring 
 with much show of justice that he had created anew the Conservative 
 party. The position of the Whigs would in any case have been difficult. 
 Thoir mandate, to use the French phrase, seemed to be exhausted. They
 
 ,839. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN T1MKS. 09 
 
 had no new tiling to propose. They came into power as reformers, and 
 now they had nothing to offer in the way of reform. It may be taken as 
 a certainty that in English politics reaction must always follow advance. 
 The Whigs must just then have come in for the effects of reaction. But 
 they had more than that to contend with. In our own time, Mr. Gladstone 
 had no sooner passed his great measures of reform than he began to expe- 
 rience the effects of reaction. But there was a great difference between 
 his situation and that of the Whigs under Melbourne. lie had not Jailed 
 to satisfy the demands of his followers. He had no extreme wing of his 
 party clamouring against him on the ground that he had made use of their 
 strength to help him in carrying out as much of his programme as suited 
 his own coterie, and that he had then deserted them. This was the condi- 
 tion of the Whigs. The more advanced Liberals and the whole body of 
 the Chartists, and the working classes generally, detested and denounced 
 them. Many of the Liberals had had some hope while Lord Durham still 
 seemed likely to be a political power, but with the fading of his influence 
 they lost all interest in the Whig Ministry. On the other hand the sup 
 port of O'Connell was a serious disadvantage to Melbourne and his party 
 in England. 
 
 But the Whig ministers were always adding by some mistake or other 
 to the difficulties of their position. The Jamaica Bill put them in great 
 perplexity. This was a measixre brought in on April 9, l<S3i), to make 
 temporary provision for the government of the island of Jamaica, by setting 
 aside the House of Assembly for five years, and during that time empower- 
 ing the governor and council with three salaried commissioners to manage 
 the affairs of the colony. In other words, the Melbourne Ministry pro- 
 posed to suspend for five years the constitution of Jamaica. No body of 
 persons can be more awkwardly placed than a Whig Ministry proposing 
 to set aside a constitutional government anywhere. Such a proposal may 
 be a necessary measure ; it may be unavoidable; but it always comes 
 with a bad grace from Whigs or Liberals, and gives their enemies a handle 
 against them which they cannot fail to use to some purpose. What, indeed, 
 it may be plausibly asked, is the raison d'etre of a Liberal Government if 
 they have to return to the old Tory policy of suspended constitutions and 
 absolute law ? When Kabagas, become minister, tells his master that the 
 only way to silence discontent is by the liberal use of the cannon, the 
 Prince of Monaco remarks very naturally, that if that was to lie the policy, 
 he might as well have kept to his old ministers and his absolutism. So it 
 is with an English Liberal Ministry advising the suspension of consti- 
 tutions. 
 
 In the case of the Jamaica Bill there Avas some excuse for the harsh
 
 70 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. <vu 
 
 policy. After the abolition of slavery, the former masters in the island 
 found it very hard to reconcile themselves to the new condition of things. 
 They could not all at once understand that their former slaves were to be 
 their equals before the law. As we have seen much more lately in the 
 Southern States of America after the civil war and the emancipation of 
 the negroes, there was still a pertinacious attempt made by the planter 
 class to regain in substance the power they had had to renounce in name. 
 This was not to be justified or excused ; but as human nature is made it 
 was not unnatural. On the other hand, some of the Jamaica negroes were 
 too ignorant to understand that they had acquired any rights ; others were 
 a little too clamorous in their assertion. Many a planter worked his men 
 and whipped his women just as before the emancipation, and the victims 
 did not understand that they had any right to complain. Many negroes, 
 ajrain, were ignorantly and thoughtlessly ' bumptious,' to use a vulgar 
 expression, in the assertion of their newly-found equality. The Imperial 
 governors and officials were generally and justly eager to protect the 
 negroes; and the result was a constant quarrel between the Jamaica 
 House of Assembly and the representatives of the home Government. 
 The Assembly became more insolent and offensive every day. A bill, 
 very necessary in itself, was passed by the Imperial Parliament for the 
 better regulation of prisons in Jamaica, and the House of Assembly refused 
 to submit to any such legislation. Under these circumstances the Mel- 
 bourne Ministry proposed the suspension of the constitution of the island. 
 The measure was opposed, not only by Peel and the Conservatives, but by 
 many Radicals. It was argued that there were many courses open to the 
 Ministry short of the high-handed proceeding they proposed ; and in truth 
 there was not that confidence in the Melbourne Ministry at all Avhich would 
 have enabled them to obtain from Parliament a majority sufficient to carry 
 through such a policy. The Ministry was weak and discredited; anybody 
 might now throw a stone at it. They only had a majority of five in favour 
 of their measure. This, of course, was a virtual defeat. The Ministry 
 acknowledged it and resigned. Their defeat was a humiliation ; their 
 resignation an inevitable submission ; but they came back to office almost 
 immediately under conditions that made the humiliation more humbling, 
 and rendered their subsequent career more difficult by far than their past 
 struggle for existence had been. 
 
 The return of the Whigs to office for they cannot be said to have 
 returned to power came about in a very odd \v;:y. Gulliver ought to 
 have had an opportunity of telling such a story to the king of the Brob- 
 dingnagians, in order the better to impress him with a clear idea of the 
 logical beauty of constitutional government. It was an entirely new il/us
 
 1830. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMER. 71 
 
 tration of the old clterchez lafemme principle, t\w famine in this case, how- 
 ever, being altogether a passive and innocent cause of trouble. The famous 
 controversy known as the ' Bedchamber Question ' made a way back for 
 the Whigs into place. When Lord Melbourne resigned, the Queen sent 
 for the Duke of Wellington, who advised her to apply to Sir Robert Peel, 
 lor the reason that the chief difficulties of a Conservative Government 
 would be in the I louse of Commons. The Queen sent for Peel, and when 
 he came, told him with a simple and girlish frankness that she was sorry 
 to have to part with her late ministers, of whose conduct she entirely 
 approved, but that she bowed to constitutional usage. This must have 
 been rather an astonishing beginning to the grave and formal Peel; but 
 he was not a man to think any worse of the candid young Sovereign for 
 her outspoken ways. The negotiations went on very smoothly as to the 
 colleagues Peel meant to recommend to her Majesty, until he happened to 
 notice the composition of the royal household as regarded the ladies most 
 closely in attendance on the Queen. For example, he found that the Avife 
 of Lord Normanby and the si.ster of Lord Morpeth were the two ladies in 
 closest attendance on her Majesty. Now it has to be borne in mind it 
 was proclaimed again and again during the negotiations that the chief 
 difficulty of the Conservatives would necessarily be in Ireland, where their 
 policy woiild be altogether opposed to that of the Whigs. Lord Normanby 
 had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland under the Whigs, and Lord Morpeth, 
 whom we can all remember as the amiable and accomplished Lord Carlisle 
 of later time, Irish Secretary. It certainly could not be satisfactory for 
 Peel to try to work a new Irish policy while the closest household com- 
 panions of the Queen were the wife and sister of the displaced statesmen 
 who directly represented the policy he had to supersede. Had this point 
 of view been made clear to the Sovereign at first, it is hardly possible that 
 any serious difficulty could have arisen. The Queen must have seen the 
 obvious reasonableness of Peel's request; nor is it to be supposed that the 
 two ladies in question could have desired to hold their places under such 
 circumstances. But unluckily some misunderstanding took place at the 
 very beginning of the conversations on this point. Peel only desired to 
 press for the retirement of the ladies holding the higher offices; he did not 
 intend to ask for any change affecting a place lower in official rank than 
 that of lady of the bedchamber. But somehow or other he conveyed to 
 the mind of the Queen a different idea. She thought he meant to insist, 
 as a matter of principle, upon the removal of all her familiar attendants 
 and household associates. Under this impression she consulted Lord John 
 Russell, who advised her on what he understood to be the state of the 
 facts. On his advice the Queen stated in reply that she could not ' con-
 
 72 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. TI. 
 
 sent to a course which she conceives to be contrary to usage and is repug- 
 nant to her feelings.' Sif Robert Peel held firm to his stipulation ; and the 
 chance of his then forming a Ministry was at an end. Lord Melbourne 
 and his colleagues had to be recalled ; and at a Cabinet meeting they 
 adopted a minute declaring it reasonable ' that the great offices of the 
 Court and situations in the household held by members of Parliament 
 should be included in the political arrangements made on a change in the 
 Administration ; but they are not of opinion that a similar principle 
 should be applied or extended to the offices held by ladies in her Majesty's 
 household.' 
 
 The matter was naturally made the subject of explanation in both 
 Houses of Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was undoubtedly right in his 
 view of the question, and if he had been clearly understood the right 
 could hardly have been disputed ; but he defended his position in lan- 
 guage of what now seems rather ludicrous exaggeration. He treated this 
 question de jupons as if it were of the last importance not alone to the 
 honour of the Ministry, but even to the safety of the realm. ' I ask you,' 
 he said, ' to go back to other times : take Pitt or Fox, or any other minis- 
 ter of this proud country, and answer for yourselves the question, is it 
 fitting that one man shall be the minister, responsible for the most arduous 
 charge that can fall to the lot of man, and that the wife of the other that 
 other his most formidable political enemy shall, with his express consent, 
 hold office in immediate attendance on the Sovereign ? ' ' Oh, no ! ' he ex- 
 claimed, in an outburst of indignant eloquence. 'I felt that it was impos- 
 sible ; I could not consent to this. Feelings more powerful than reasoning 
 told me that it was not for my own honour or for the public interests that 
 I should consent to be Minister of England.' This high-flown language 
 seems oddly out of place on the lips of a statesman who of all his con- 
 temporaries was the least apt to indulge in bursts of overwrought senti- 
 ment. Lord Melbourne, on the other hand, defended his action in the 
 House of Lords in language of equal exaggeration. ' I resume office,' he 
 said, 'unequivocally and solely for this reason, that I will not desert my 
 Sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress, especially when a demand 
 is made upon her Majesty with which I think she ought not to comply ; a 
 demand inconsistent with her personal honour, and which, if acquiesced in, 
 would render her reign liable to all the, changes and variations of political 
 parties, and make her domestic life one constant scene of unhappiness and 
 discomfort.' 
 
 In the country the incident created great excitement. Some Liberals 
 bluntly insisted that it wa.-! not right in such a matter to consult the feel- 
 ings of the Sovereign at all, and that the advice of the minister, and liiw
 
 1689. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 73 
 
 idea of what was lor the good of the country, ought alone to be considered. 
 On the other hand, O'Connell burst into impassioned language of praise 
 and delight, as he dwelt upon the decision of the Queen, and called upon 
 the Powers above to bless ' the young creature that creature of only 
 nineteen, as pure as she is exalted,' who consulted not her head but ' the 
 overHowing feelings of her young heart.' ' Those excellent women who 
 had been so long attached to her, who had nursed and tended to her wants 
 in her childhood, who had watched over her in her sickness, whose eyes 
 beamed with delight as they saw her increasing daily in beauty and in 
 loveliness when they were threatened to be forced away from her her 
 heart told her that she could as well part with that heart itself as with 
 those whom it held so dear.' Feargus O'Connor went a good deal further, 
 however, when he boldly declared that he had excellent authority for the 
 statement, that if the Tories had got the young Queen into their hands by 
 the agency of the new ladies of the bedchamber, they had a plan for put- 
 ting her out of the way and placing ' the bloody Cumberland ' on the 
 throne in her stead. In O'ConnelPs case, no mystery was made of the 
 fact that he believed the ladies actually surrounding the young Queen to 
 be friendly to what he considered the cause of Ireland ; and that he was 
 satisfied that Peel and the Tories -were against it. For the wild talk 
 represented by the words of Feargus O'Connor, it is only necessary to 
 say that, frenzied and foolish as it must seem now to us, and as it must 
 even then have seemed to all rational beings, it had the firm acceptance of 
 large masses of people throughout the country, who persisted in seeing in 
 Peel's pleadings for the change of the bedchamber women the positive 
 evidence of an unscrupulous Tory plot to get possession of the Queen's 
 person, not indeed for the purpose of violently altering the succession, 
 but in the hope of poisoning her mind against all Liberal opinions. 
 
 Lord Brougham was not likely to lose so good an opportunity of 
 attacking Lord Melbourne and his colleagues. He insisted that Lord 
 Melbourne had sacrificed Liberal principles and the interests of the country 
 to the private feelings of the Sovereign. 'I thought,' he declared in a 
 burst of eloquent passion, ' that we belonged to a country in which the 
 government by the Crown and the wisdom of Parliament, was everything, 
 and the personal feelings of the Sovereign were absolutely not to be named 
 at the same time. ... I little thought to have lived to hear it said by the 
 Whigs of 1S39, "Let us rally round the Queen; never mind the House 
 of Commons ; never mind measures ; throw principles to the dogs ; leave 
 pledges unredeemed ; but for God's sake rally round the throne." Little 
 did I think the clay would come when I should hear such language, not 
 from the unconstitutional, place-hunting, king-loving Tories, who thought
 
 74 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vi. 
 
 the public was made for the king, not the king for the public, but from 
 the Whigs themselves ! The Jamaica Bill, said to be a most important 
 measure, had been brought forward. The Government staked their exis- 
 tence upon it. They were not able to carry it ; they therefore conceived 
 they had lost the confidence of the House of Commons. They thought 
 it a measure of paramount necessity then. Is it less necessary now ? 
 Oh, but that is altered ! The Jamaica question is to be new fashioned ; 
 principles are to be given up, and all because of two ladies of the bed- 
 chamber.' 
 
 Nothing could be more undesirable than the position in which Lord 
 Melbourne and his colleagues had allowed the Sovereign to place herself. 
 The more people in general came to think over the matter, the more 
 clearly it was seen that Peel was in the right, although he had not made 
 himself understood at first, and had, perhaps, not shown all through 
 enough of consideration for the novelty of the young Sovereign's position, 
 or for the difficulty of finding a conclusive precedent on such a question, 
 seeing that since the principle of ministerial responsibility had come to be 
 recognised among us in its genuine sense, there never before had been a 
 woman on the throne. But no one could deliberately maintain the posi- 
 tion at first taken up by the Whigs ; and in point of fact they were soon 
 glad to drop it as quickly and quietly as possible. The whole question, 
 it may be said at once, was afterwards settled by a sensible compromise 
 which the Prince Consort suggested. It was agreed that on a change of 
 Ministry the Queen would listen to any representation from the incoming 
 Prime Minister as to the composition of her household, and would arrange 
 for the retirement 'of their own accord' of any ladies who were so closely 
 related to the leaders of Opposition as to render their presence incon- 
 venient. The Whigs came back to office utterly discredited. They had 
 to tinker up somehow a new Jamaica Bill. They had declared that they 
 could not remain in office unless they were allowed to deal in a certain 
 way with Jamaica ; and now that they were back again in office, they 
 could not avoid trying to do something with the Jamaica business. They 
 therefore introduced a new bill which was a mere compromise put together 
 in the hope of its being allowed to pas. It was allowed to pass, alter a 
 fashion ; that is, when the Opposition in the House of Lords had tinkered 
 it and amended it at their pleasure. The bedchamber question in fact 
 had thrown Jamaica out of perspective. The unfortunate island must 
 do the best it could now ; in this country statesmen had graver matter 
 to think of. Sir Robert Peel could not govern with Lady Normanby ; 
 the Whigs would not govern without her. 
 
 It does not seem by any means clear, however, that Lord Melbourne
 
 1839. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMER. 75 
 
 and his colleagues deserved the savage censure of Lord Brougham merely 
 for having returned to office and given up their original position with 
 regard to the Jamaica Bill. What else remained to be done? If they 
 had refused to come back, the only result would have been that Peel 
 must have become Prime Minister, with a distinct minority in the House 
 of Commons. Peel could not have held his ground there, except by the 
 favour and mercy of his opponents; and those were not merciful days in 
 politics. He would only have taken office to be called upon at once to 
 resign it by some adverse vote of the House of Commons. The state of 
 things seems in this respect to be not unlike that which existed when Mr. 
 Gladstone was defeated on the Irish University Bill in 1873. Mr. Glad- 
 stone resigned ; or rather tendered his resignation ; and by his advice her 
 Majesty invited Mr. Disraeli to form a Cabinet. Mr. Disraeli did not see 
 his way to undertake the government of the country with the existing 
 House of Commons ; and as the conditions under which he was willing 
 to undertake the duty were not conveniently attainable, the negotiation 
 came to an end. The Queen sent again for Mr. Gladstone, who consented 
 to resume his place as Prime Minister. If Lord Melbourne returned to 
 office with the knowledge that he could not carry the Jamaica Bill which 
 lie had declared to be necessary, Mr. Gladstone resumed his place at the 
 head of his Ministry without the remotest hope of being able to carry his 
 Irish University measure. No one ever found fault with Mr. Gladstone 
 for having, under the circumstances, done the best he could, and consented 
 to meet the request of the Sovereign and the convenience of the public 
 service by again taking on himself the responsibility of government, 
 although the measure on which he had declared he would stake the 
 existence of his Ministry had been rejected by the House of Commons. 
 
 Still it cannot be denied that the Melbourne Government were preju- 
 diced in the public mind by these events, and by the attacks for which 
 they gave so large an opportunity. The feeling in some parts of the 
 country was still sentimentally with the Queen. At many a dinner table 
 it became the fashion to drink the health of her Majesty with a punning 
 addition, not belonging to an order of w r it any higher than that which 
 in other days toasted the King 'over the water; ' or prayed of heaven to 
 4 send this crumb well down.' The Queen was toasted as the sovereign of 
 spirit who ' would not let her belles be peeled.' But the Ministry were 
 almost universally believed to have placed themselves in a ridiculous light, 
 and to have crept again into office, as Mr. Molesworth puts it in his valuable 
 ' History of England from 1830 to 1874,' ' behind the petticoats of the 
 ladies in waiting.' The death of Lady Flora Hastings, which occurred 
 almost immediately, tended further to arouse a feeling of dislike to
 
 76 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CK. vn 
 
 the Whigs. This melancholy event does not need any lengthened com- 
 ment. A young lady who belonged to the household of the Duchess of 
 Kent fell under an unfounded, but in the circumstances not wholly 
 unreasonable, suspicion. It was the classic story of Calisto, Diana's 
 unhappy nymph, reversed. Lady Flora was proved to be innocent ; but 
 her death, imminent probably in any case from the disease which had 
 fastened on her, was doubtless hastened by the humiliation to which she 
 had been subjected. It does not seem that anyone was to blame in the 
 matter. The Ministry certainly do not appear to have done anything for 
 which they could fairly be reproached. No one can be surprised that 
 those who surrounded the Queen and the Duchess of Kent should have 
 taken some pains to inquire into the truth or falsehood of scandalous 
 rumours, for which there might have appeared to be some obvious justifi- 
 cation. But the whole story was so sad and shocking; the death of the 
 poor young lady followed with such tragic rapidity upon the establishment 
 of her innocence; the natural complaints of her mother were so loud and 
 impassioned, that the ministers who had to answer the mother's appeals 
 were unavoidably placed in an invidious and a painful position. The 
 demands of the Marchioness of Hastings for redress were unreasonable. 
 They endeavoured to make out the existence of a cruel conspiracy against 
 Lady Flora, and called for the peremptory dismissal and disgrace of the 
 eminent court physician, who had merely performed a most painful duty, 
 and whose report had been the especial means of establishing the injustice 
 of the suspicions which were directed against her. But it was a 
 damaging duty for a minister to have to write to the distracted mother, as 
 Lord Melbourne found it necessary to do, telling her that her demand was 
 ' so unprecedented and objectionable, that even the respect due to your 
 ladyship's sex, rank, family and character would not justify me in more, 
 if indeed it authorises so much, than acknowledging that letter for the sole 
 purpose of acquainting your ladyship that I have received it.' The 
 ' Palace scandal,' as it was called, became known shortly before the dispute 
 about the ladies of the bedchamber. The death of Lady Flora Hastings 
 happened soon after it. It is not strictly in logical propriety that such 
 events, or their rapid succession, should tend to bring into disrepute the 
 Ministry who can only be regarded as their historical contemporaries. 
 But the world must change a great deal before ministers are no longer 
 held accountable in public opinion for anything but the events over which 
 they can be shown to have some control.
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 77 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE QUEEN'S MAUKIAGE. 
 
 ON January 16, 1840, the Queen, opening Parliament in person, an- 
 nounced her intention to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg- 
 Gotha a step which she trusted would be ' conducive to the interests of 
 my people as well as to my own domestic happiness.' In the discussion 
 which followed in the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel observed that 
 her Majesty had ' the singular good fortune to be able to gratify her 
 private feelings, while she performs her public duty, and to obtain the 
 best guarantee for happiness by contracting an alliance founded on affec- 
 tion.' Peel spoke the simple truth ; it was indeed a marriage founded on 
 affection. No marriage contracted in the humblest class could have been 
 more entirely a union of love, and more free from what might be called 
 selfish and worldly considerations. The Queen had for a long time loved 
 her cousin. He was nearly her own age, the Queen being the elder by 
 three months and two or three days. Francis Charles Augustus Albert 
 Emmanuel was the full name of the young Prince. He was the second 
 son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and of his wife Louisa, 
 daughter of Augustus Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Prince Albert was 
 born at the Rosenau, one of his father's residences, near Coburg, on 
 August 26, 1819. The Court historian notices with pardonable com- 
 placency the 'remarkable coincidence' easily explained, surely that 
 the same accoucheuse, Madame Siebold, assisted at the birth of Prince 
 Albert, and of the Queen some three months before, and that the Prince 
 was baptised "by the clergyman, Professor Genzler, who had the year 
 before officiated at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. A 
 marriage between the Princess Victoria and Prince Albert had been 
 thought of as desirable among the families on both sides, but it was always? 
 Avisely resolved that nothing should be said to the young Princess on the 
 subject unless she herself showed a distinct liking for her cousin. In 
 1836, Prince Albert was brought by his father to England, and made the 
 personal acquaintance of the Princess, and she seems at once to have been 
 drawn towards him in the manner which her family and friends would 
 most have desired. Three years later the Prince again came to England, 
 and the Queen, in a letter to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote of 
 him in the warmest terms. ' Albert's beauty,' she said, ' is most striking, 
 and he is most amiable and unaffected in short, very fascinating.' Not 
 many days after she wrote to another friend and faithful counsellor, the
 
 78 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cu. ni. 
 
 Baron Stockmar, to say, 'I do feel so guilty I know not how to begin my 
 letter ; but I think the news it will contain will be sufficient to ensure 
 your forgiveness. Albert has completely won my heart, and all was 
 settled between us this morning.' The Queen had just before informed 
 Lord Melbourne of her intention, and Lord Melbourne, it is needless to 
 say, expressed his decided approval. There was no one to disapprove of 
 such a marriage. 
 
 Prince Albert was a young man to win the heart of any girl. He 
 was singularly handsome, graceful and gifted. In princes, as we know, a 
 small measure of beauty and accomplishment suffices to throw courtiers 
 and court ladies into transports of admiration ; but h,^d Prince Albert 
 been the son of a farmer or a butler, he must have been admired for his 
 singular personal attractions. lie had had a sound and a varied education. 
 He had been brought up as if he were to be a professional musician, a pro- 
 fessional chemist or botanist, and a professor of history and belles lettres and 
 the fine arts. The scientific and the literary were remarkably blended in his 
 bringing-up ; remarkably, that is to say, for some half-century ago, when 
 even in Germany a system of education seldom aimed at being totus. teres 
 atque rotundus. lie had begun to study the constitutional history of 
 States, and was preparing himself to take an interest in politics. There 
 was much of the practical and business-like about him, as he showed in 
 after-life; he loved farming and took a deep interest in machinery and in 
 the growth of industrial science. lie was a sort of combination of the 
 troubadour, the savant, and the man of business. His tastes were for a 
 quiet, domestic and unostentatious life a life of refined culture, of happy 
 calm evenings, of art and poetry and genial communion with Nature. He 
 was made happy by the songs of birds, and delighted in sitting alone and 
 playing the organ. But there was in him too a great deal of the political 
 philosopher. He loved to hear political and other questions well argued 
 out, and once observed that a false argument jarred on his nerves as much 
 as a false note in music. He seems to have had from his youth an all- 
 pervading sense of duty. So far as we can guess, he was almost absolutely 
 free from the ordinary follies, not to say sins, of youth. Young as he 
 was when he married the Queen, he devoted himself at once to what he 
 conscientiously believed to be the duties of Ins station with a self-control 
 and self devotion rare even among the aged, and almost unknown in 
 youth. He gave up every habit, however familiar and dear, every pre- 
 dilection no matter how sweet, every indulgence of sentiment or amuse- 
 ment, that in any way threatened to interfere with the steadfast performance 
 of the part he had assigned to himself. No man ever devoted himself 
 more faithfully to the difficult duties of a high and anew situation, or kept
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 79 
 
 more strictly to liis resolve. It was no task to him to be a tender husband 
 and a loving father. This was a part of his sweet, pure and affectionate 
 nature. It may well be doubted whether any other queen ever had a 
 married life so happy as that of Queen Victoria. 
 
 The marriage of the Queen and the Prince took place on February 10. 
 1840. The reception given by the people in general to the Prince on his 
 landing in England a few days before the ceremony, and on the day of the 
 marriage, was cordial and even enthusiastic. But it is not certain whether 
 there was a very cordial feeling to the Prince among all classes of poli- 
 ticians. A rumour of the most absurd kind had got abroad in certain 
 circles that the young Albert was not a Protestant that he was in fact a 
 member of the Church of Rome. In a different circle the belief was 
 curiously cherished that the Prince was a free-thinker in matters oi 
 religion and a radical in politics. Somewhat unfortunately, the declara- 
 tion of the intended marriage to the Privy Council did not mention the 
 fact that Albert was a Protestant Prince. The Cabinet no doubt thought 
 that the leaders of public opinion on all sides of polities would have had 
 historical knowledge among them to teach them that Prince Albert 
 belonged to that branch of the Saxon family which since the Reformation 
 had been conspicuously Protestant. ' There has not,' Prince Albert him- 
 self wrote to the Queen on December 7, 1 839, ' been a single Catholic 
 princess introduced into the Coburg family since the appearance of Luther 
 in 1521. Moreover the Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony was the 
 very first Protestant that ever lived.' No doubt the Ministry thought also 
 that the constitutional rule which forbids an English sovereign to marry 
 with a Roman Catholic under penalty of forfeiting the crown, would be 
 regarded as a sufficient guarantee that when they announced the Queen's 
 approaching marriage it must be a marriage with a Protestant. All this 
 assumption, however reasonable and natural, did not find warrant in the 
 events that actually took place. It would have been better of course if 
 the Government had assumed that Parliament and the public generally 
 knew nothing about the Prince and his ancestry, or the constitutional 
 penalties for a member of the Royal Family marrying a Catholic, and had 
 formally announced that the choice of Queen Victoria had happily fallen 
 on a Protestant. The wise and foreseeing Leopold, King of the Belgians, 
 had recommended that the fact should be specifically mentioned ; but it 
 was perhaps a part of Lord Melbourne's indolent good nature to take it 
 for granted that people generally would be calm and reasonable, and that 
 all would go right without interruption or cavil. He therefore acted on 
 the assumption that any formal mention of Prince Albert's Protestantism 
 be superfluous; and neither in the declaration to the Privy Council,
 
 80 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vn 
 
 nor in the announcement to Parliament, was a word said upon the subject. 
 The result was that in the debate on the address in the House of Lords a 
 Bomevvhat unseemly altercation took place, an altercation the more to be 
 regretted because it might have been so easily spared. The question was 
 bluntly raised by no less a person than the Duke of Wellington whether 
 the future husband of the Queen was or was not a Protestant. The Duke 
 actually charged the Ministry with having purposely left out the word 
 ' Protestant ' in the announcements in order that they might not offend 
 their Irish and Catholic supporters, and by the very charge did much to 
 strengthen the popular feeling against the statesmen who were supposed to 
 be kept in office by virtue o the \ atrona;re of O'Connell. The Duke 
 moved that the word ' Protestant ' be inserted in the congratulatory 
 address to the Queen, and he carried his point, although Lord Melbourne 
 held to the opinion that the word was unnecessary in describing a Prince 
 who was not only a Protestant but descended from the most Protestant 
 family in Europe. The lack of judgment and tact on the part of the 
 Ministry was never more clearly shown than in the original omission 
 of the word. 
 
 Another disagreeable occurrence was the discussion that took place 
 when the bill for the naturalisation of the Prince was brought before the 
 House of Lords. The bill in its title merely set out the proposal to pro- 
 vide for the naturalisation of the Prince ; but it contained a clause to 
 give him precedence for life ' next after her Majesty, in Parliament or 
 elsewhere, as her Majesty might think proper.' A great deal of objection 
 was raised by the Duke of Wellington and Lord Brougham to this clause 
 on its own merits ; but, as was natural, the objections were infinitely 
 aggravated by the singular want of judgment, and even of common pro- 
 priety, which could introduce a clause conferring on the Sovereign powers 
 so large and so new into a mere naturalisation bill, without any previous 
 notice to Parliament. The matter was ultimately settled by allowing the 
 bill to remain a simple naturalisation measure, and leaving the question of 
 precedence to be dealt with by Royal prerogative. Both the great political 
 parties concurred without further difficulty in an arrangement by which 
 it was provided in letters patent that the Prince should thenceforth upon 
 all occasions, and in all meetings, except when otherwise provided by Act 
 of Parliament, have precedence next to the Queen. There never would 
 have been any difficulty in the matter if the Ministry had acted with any 
 discretion ; but it would be absurd to expect that a great nation, whose 
 constitutional system is built up of precedents, should agree at once and 
 without demur to every new arrangement which it might seem convenient 
 U> a Ministry to make in a hurry. Yet another source of dissatisfaction
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 81 
 
 to the palace and the people was created by the manner in which the 
 Ministry took upon themselves to bring forward the proposition for the 
 settlement of an annuity on the Prince. In former cases that for 
 example, of Queen Charlotte, Queen Adelaide, and Prince Leopold on his 
 marriage witli the Princess Charlotte the annuity granted had been 
 f: 0,000*. It so happened, however, that the settlement to be made on 
 Prince Albert came in times of great industrial and commercial distress. 
 The days had gone by when economy in the House of Commons was 
 looked upon as an ignoble principle, and when loyalty to the Sovereign 
 was believed to bind members of Parliament to grant without a murmur 
 of discussion any sums that might be asked by the Minister in the Sove- 
 reign's name. Parliament was beginning to feel more thoroughly its 
 responsibility as the guardian of the nation's resources, and it was no 
 longer thought a fine thing to give away the money of the taxpayer with 
 magnanimous indifference. It was therefore absurd on the part of the 
 Ministry to suppose that because great sums of money had been voted 
 without question on former occasions, they would be voted without ques- 
 tion now. It is quite possible that the whole matter might have been 
 settled without controversy if the Ministry had shown any judgment 
 whatever in their conduct of the business. In our day the Ministry 
 would at once have consulted the leaders of the Opposition. In all mat- 
 ters where the grant of money to anyone connected with the Sovereign is 
 concerned, it is now understood that the gift shall come with the full con- 
 currence of both parties in Parliament. The leader of the House of 
 Commons would probably, by arrangement, propose the grant, and the 
 leader of the Opposition would second it. In the case of the annuity to 
 Prince Albert, the Ministry had the almost incredible folly to bring for- 
 ward their proposal without having invited in any way the concurrence of 
 the Opposition. They introduced the proposal without discretion ; they 
 conducted the discussion on it without temper. They answered the most 
 reasonable objections with imputations of want of loyalty; and they gave 
 some excuse for the suspicion that they wished to provoke the Opposition 
 into some expression that might make them odious to the Queen and the 
 Prince. Mr. Hume, the economist, proposed that the annuity be reduced 
 from 50,OOOZ. to 21,OOOZ. This was negatived. Thereupon Colonel 
 Sibthorp, a once famous Tory fanatic of the most eccentric manners and 
 opinions, proposed that the sum be 30,000/., and he received the support 
 of Sir Robert Peel and other eminent members of the Opposition ; and 
 the amendment was carried. 
 
 These were not auspicious incidents to prelude the Royal marriage. 
 There can be no doubt that for a time the Queen, still more than the 
 
 VOT,. i o
 
 2 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. c&. TO. 
 
 Prince, felt their influence keenly. The Prince showed remarkable good 
 sense and appreciation of the condition of political arrangements in Eng- 
 land, and readily comprehended that there was nothing personal to himself 
 in any objections which the House of Commons might have made to the 
 proposals of the Ministry. The question of precedence was very easily 
 settled when it came to be discussed in reasonable fashion ; although it 
 was not until many years after, 1857, that the title of Prince Consort was 
 given to the husband of the Queen. 
 
 A few months after the marriage, a bill was passed providing for a 
 regency in the possible event of the death of the Queen, leaving issue. 
 With the entire concurrence of the leaders of the Opposition, who were 
 consulted this time, Prince Albert was named Regent, following the pre- 
 cedent which had been adopted in the instance of the Princess Charlotte 
 and Prince Leopold. The Duke of Sussex, uncle of the Queen, alone 
 dissented in the House of Lords, and recorded his protest against the pro- 
 posal. The passing of this bill was naturally regarded as of much im- 
 portance to Prince Albert. It gave him to some extent the status in the 
 country which he had not had before. It also proved that the Prince 
 himself had risen in the estimation of the Tory party during the few 
 months that elapsed since the debates on the annuity and the question of 
 precedence. No one could have started with a more resolute determina- 
 tion to stand clear of party politics than Prince Albert. He accepted at 
 once his position as the husband of the Queen of a constitutional country. 
 His own idea of his duty was that he should be the private secretary and 
 unofficial counsellor of the Queen. To this purpose he devoted himself 
 unswervingly. Outside that part of his duties, he constituted himself a 
 sort of minister, without portfolio, of art and education. He took an 
 interest, and often a leading part, in all projects and movements relating 
 to the spread of education, the culture of art, and the promotion of in- 
 dustrial science. Yet it was long before he was thoroughly understood by 
 the country. It was long before he became in any degree popular ; and 
 it may be doubted whether he ever was thoroughly and generally popular. 
 Not perhaps until his untimely death did the country find out how entirely 
 disinterested and faithful his life had been, and how he had made the dis- 
 charge of duty his business and his task. His character was one which is 
 liable to be regarded by ordinary observers as possessing none but negative 
 virtues. He was thought to be cold, formal, and apathetic. His manners 
 were somewhat shy and constrained, except when he was in the company 
 of those he loved, and then he commonly relaxed into a kind of boyish 
 freedom and joyousness. But to the public in general he seemed formal 
 and chilling. It is not only Mr. Pendennis who conceals his gentleness 
 uider a shy and pompous demeanour. With all his ability, his anxiety
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 83 
 
 to learn, his capacity for patient study, and his willingness to welcome 
 new ideas, he never perhaps quite understood the genius of the English 
 political system. His faithful friend and counsellor, Baron Stockmar, was 
 not the man best calculated to set him right on this subject. Both were 
 far too eager to h'nd in the English Constitution a piece of symmetrical 
 mechanism, or to treat it as a written code from which one might take 
 extracts or construct summaries for constant reference and guidance. 
 But this was not in the beginning the cause of any coldness towards the 
 Prince on the part of the English public. Prince Albert had not the 
 ways of an Englishman, and the tendency of Englishmen, then as now, 
 was to assume that to have manners other than those of an Englishman 
 was to be so far unworthy of confidence. lie was not made to shine in 
 commonplace society. He could talk admirably about something, but he 
 had not the gift of talking about nothing, and probably would not have 
 cared much to cultivate such, a faculty. He was fond of suggesting small 
 innovations and improvements in established systems, to the annoyance of 
 men with set ideas, who liked their own ways best. Thus it happened 
 that he remained for many years, if not exactly unappreciated, yet not 
 thoroughly appreciated, and that a considerable and very influential 
 section of society was always ready to cavil at what he said, and find motive 
 for suspicion in most things that he did. Perhaps be was best understood 
 and most cordially appreciated among the poorer classes of his wife's sub- 
 jects. He found also more cordial approval generally among the Radicals 
 than among the Tories, or even the Whigs. 
 
 One reform which Prince Albert worked earnestly to bring about, was 
 the abolition of duelling in the army, and the substitution of some system 
 of courts of honourable arbitration to supersede the barbaric recourse to 
 the decision of weapons. He did not succeed in having his courts of 
 honour established. There was something too fanciful in the scheme to 
 attract the authorities of our two services ; and there were undoubtedly 
 many practical difficulties in the way of making such a system effective. 
 But he succeeded so far, that he induced the Duke of Wellington and the 
 heads of the services to turn their attention very seriously to the subject, 
 and to use all the influence in their power for the purpose of discouraging 
 and discrediting the odious practice of the duel. It is carrying courtly 
 politeness too far to attribute the total disappearance of the duelling system, 
 as one biographer seems inclined to do, to the personal efforts of Prince 
 Albert. It is enough to his honour that he did his best, and that the 
 best was a substantial contribution towards so great an object. But 
 nothing can testify more strikingly to the rapid growth of a genuine 
 civilisation in Queen Victoria's reign than the utter discontinuance of tho 
 
 o 2
 
 84 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vn 
 
 duelling system. When the Queen came to the throne, and for years 
 after, it was still in full force. The duel plays a conspicuous part in the 
 fiction and the drama of the Sovereign's earlier years. It was a common 
 incident of all political controversies. It was an episode of most contested 
 elections. It was often resorted to for the purpose of deciding the right 
 or wrong of a half -drunken quarrel over a card table. It formed as 
 common a theme of gossip as an elopement or a bankruptcy. Most of the 
 eminent statesmen who were prominent in the earlier part of the Queen's 
 reign had fought duels. Peel and O'Connell had made arrangements for 
 a ' meeting.' Mr. Disraeli had challenged O'Connell or any of the sons of 
 O'Connell. The great agitator himself had killed his man in a duel. Mr. 
 Roebuck had gone out ; Mr. Cobden at a much later period had been 
 visited with a challenge, and had had the good sense and the moral 
 courage to laugh at it. At the present hour a duel in England would 
 seem as absurd and barbarous an anachronism as an ordeal by touch or a 
 witch-burning. Many years have passed since a duel was last talked of 
 in Parliament ; and then it was only the subject of a reprobation that had 
 some work to do to keep its countenance while administering the proper 
 rebuke. But it was not the influence of any one man, or even any class 
 of men, that brought about in so short a time this striking change in the 
 tone of public feeling and morality. The change was part of the growth 
 of education and of civilisation; of the strengthening and broadening 
 influence of the press, the platform, the cheap book, the pulpit, and the 
 less restricted intercourse of classes. 
 
 This is perhaps as suitable a place as any other to introduce some 
 notice of the attempts that were made from time to time upon the life of 
 the Queen. It is proper to say something of them, although not one 
 possessed the slightest political importance, or could be said to illustrate 
 anything more than sheer lunacy, or that morbid vanity and thirst for 
 notoriety that is nearly akin to genuine madness. The first attempt was 
 made on June 10, 1840, by Edward Oxford, a potboy of seventeen, who 
 fired two shots at the Queen as she was driving up Constitution Hill with 
 Prince Albert. Oxford fired both shots deliberately enough, but happily 
 missed in each case. He proved to have been an absurd creature, half 
 crazy with a longing to consider himself a political prisoner and to be 
 talked of. When he was tried, the jury pronounced him insane, and he 
 was ordered to be kept in a lunatic asylum during her Majesty's pleasure. 
 The trial completely dissipated some wild alarms that were felt, founded 
 chiefly on absurd papers in Oxford's possession, about a tremendous secret 
 society called ' Young England,' having among its other objects the 
 assassination of royal personages. It is a not uninteresting illustration
 
 IflIX, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMIiS. 85 
 
 of the condition of public feeling, that some of the Irish Catholic papers in 
 (seeming good faith denounced Oxford as an agent of the Duke of Cumber- 
 land arid the Orangemen, and declared that the object was to assassinate 
 the Queen and put the Duke on the throne. The trial showed th;it 
 Oxford was the agent of nobody, and was impelled by nothing but his 
 own crack-brained love of notoriety. The finding of the jury was 
 evidently something of a compromise, for it is very doubtful whether the 
 boy was insane in the medical sense, and whether he was fairly to be held 
 irresponsible for his actions. But it was felt perhaps that the wisest 
 course was to treat him as a madman ; and the result did not prove un- 
 satisfactory. Mr. Theodore Martin, in his ' Life of the Prince Consort,' 
 expresses a different opinion. He thinks it would have been well if 
 Oxford had been dealt with as guilty in the ordinary way. ' The best 
 commentary,' he says, ' on the lenity thus shown was pronounced by 
 Oxford himself, on being told of the similar attempts of Francis and Bean 
 in 18-12, when he declared that if he had been hanged there would have 
 been no more shooting at the Queen.' It may be reasonably doubted 
 whether the authority of Oxford as to the general influence of criminal 
 legislation is very valuable. Against the philosophic opinion of the half- 
 crazy young potboy on which Mr. Martin places so much reliance, may be 
 set the fact, that in other countries where attempts on the life of the 
 sovereign have been punished by the stern award of death, it has not been 
 found that the execution of one fanatic was a safe protection against the 
 murderous fanaticism of another. 
 
 On May 30, 1842, a man named John Francis, son of a machinist in 
 Drury Lane, fired a pistol at the Queen as she was driving down Consti- 
 tution Hill, on the very spot where Oxford's attempt was made. This 
 was a somewhat serious attempt, for Francis Avas not more than a few feet 
 from the carriage, which fortunately was driving at a very rapid rate. 
 The Queen showed great composure. She was in some measure prepared 
 for the attempt, for it seems certain that the same man had on the previous 
 evening presented a pistol at the royal carriage, although he did not then 
 fire it. Francis was arrested and put on trial. lie was only twenty-two 
 years of age, and although at first he endeavoured to brazen it out and 
 piit on a sort of melodramatic regicide aspect, yet when the sentence of 
 death for high treason was passed on him he fell into a swoon and was 
 carried insensible from the coiirt. The sentence was not carried into 
 effect. It was not certain whether the pistol was loaded at all, and 
 whether the whole performance was not a mere piece of brutal play-acting 
 done out of a longing to be notorious. Her Majesty herself was anxious 
 thai, the <?eath sentence should not be carried into effect, and it was finally
 
 86 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vu. 
 
 commuted to one of transportation for life. The very day after this 
 mitigation of punishment became publicly known another attempt was 
 made by a hunchbacked lad named Bean. As the Queen was passing 
 from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Koyal, Be:in presented a pistol at 
 her carriage, but did not succeed in firing it before his hand was seized by 
 a prompt and courageous boy who was standing near-. The pistol was 
 found to be loaded with powder, paper closely rammed down, and some 
 scraps of a clay pipe. It may be asked whether the argument of Mr. 
 Martin is not fully borne out by this occurrence, and whether the fact of 
 Bean's attempt having been made on the day after the commutation of the 
 capital sentence in the case of Francis is not evidence that the leniency in 
 the former instance was the cause of the attempt made in the. latter. But 
 it wa. made clear, and the fact is recorded on the authority of Prince 
 Albeit himself, that Bean had announced his determination to make the 
 attempt several days before the sentence of Francis was commuted, and 
 while Francis was actually lying under sentence of death. With regard to 
 Francis himself, the Prince was clearly of opinion that to carry out the 
 capital sentence would have been nothing less than a judicial murder, as 
 it is essential that the act should be committed with intent to kill or wound, 
 and in Francis's case to all appearance this was not the fact, or at least it 
 was open to grave doubt. In this calm and wise way did the husband of 
 the Queen, who had always shared with her whatever of danger there 
 might be in the attempts, argue as to the manner in which they ought to be 
 dealt with. The ambition which fired most or all of the miscreants who 
 thus disturbed the Queen and the country was that of the mountebank 
 rather than of the assassin. The Queen herself showed how thoroughly 
 she understood the significance of all that had happened, when she 
 declared, according to Mr. Martin, that she expected a repetition of the 
 attempts on her life so long as the law remained unaltered by which they 
 could be dealt with only as acts of high treason. The seeming dignity of 
 martyrdom had something fascinating in it to morbid vanity or crazy 
 fanaticism, while on the other hand it was almost certain that the martyr's 
 penalty would not in the end be inflicted. A very appropriate change in 
 the law was effected by which a punishment at once sharp and degrading 
 was provided even for mere mountebank attempts against the Queen ; a 
 punishment which was certain to be inflicted. A bill was introduced by 
 Sir Robert Peel making such attempts punishable by transportation for 
 seven years, or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years, 
 'the culprit to be publicly or privately whipped as often and in such 
 manner as the court shall direct, not exceeding thrice.' Bean was con- 
 victed under this act and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment in
 
 1619-7^. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIM US. 87 
 
 Millbank Penitentiary. This did not, however, conclude the attacks on 
 the Queen. An Irish brickhiyer, named Hamilton, fired a pistol, charged 
 only with powder, at her Majesty, on Constitution Hill, on May 1!), 1811), 
 and was sentenced to seven years' transportation. A man named JJobert 
 Pate, once a lieutenant of hussars, struck her Majesty on the face with a 
 stick as she was leaving the Duke of Cambridge's residence in her carriage 
 on May 27, 1850. This man was sentenced to seven years' transportation, 
 but the judge paid so much attention to the plea of insanity s-et up on 
 his behalf, as to omit from his punishment the whipping which might 
 have been ordered. Finally, on February 29, 1872, a lad of seventeen, 
 named Arthur O'Connor, presented a pistol at the Queen as she was 
 entering Buckingham Palace ai'ter a drive. The pistol, however, proved 
 to be unloaded an antique and useless or harmless weapon, with a Hint 
 lock which was broken, and in the barrel a piece of greasy red rag. The 
 wretched lad held a paper in one hand which Avas found to be some sort 
 of petition on behalf of the Fenian prisoners. When he came up for 
 trial a plea of insanity was put in on his behalf, but he did not seem to be 
 insane in the sense of being irresponsible for his actions or incapable of 
 understanding the penalty they involved, and he was sentenced to twelve 
 months' imprisonment and a whipping. We have hurried over many 
 years for the purpose of completing this painful and ludicrous catalogue of 
 the attempts made against the Queen. It will be seen that in not a single 
 instance was there the slightest political significance to be attached to 
 them. Even in our own softened and civilised time it sometimes happens 
 that an attempt is made on the life of a sovereign which, however we may 
 condemn and reprobate it on moral grounds, yet does seem to bear a dis- 
 tinct political meaning, and to show that there are fanatical minds still 
 burning under some sense of national or personal wrong. But in the 
 various attacks which were made on Queen Victoria nothing of the kind 
 was even pretended. There was no opportunity for any vapouring about 
 Brutus aud Charlotte Corday. The impulse, where it was not that of 
 sheer insanity, was of kin to the vulgar love of notoriety in certain minds 
 which sets on those whom it pervades to mutilate noble works of art and 
 scrawl their autographs on the marble of immortal monuments. There 
 was a great deal of wisdom shown in not dealing too severely with most 
 of these offences and in not treating them too much au serieux. Prince 
 Albert himself said that ' the vindictive feeling of the common people 
 would be a thousand times more dangerous than the madness of individuals/ 
 There was not indeed the slightest danger at any time that the ' common 
 people ' of England could be wrought up to any sympathy with as.-as.sin- 
 ation ; nor was this what Prince Albert meant. But the Queen and her
 
 88 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vn. 
 
 husband were yet new to power, and the people hud not quite lost all 
 memory of sovereigns who, well-meaning enough, had yet scarcely under- 
 stood constitutional government, and there were wild rumours of reaction 
 this way and revolution that way. It might have fomented a feeling of 
 distrust and dissatisfaction if the people had seen any disposition on the 
 part of those in authority to strain the criminal law for the sake of en- 
 forcing a death penalty against creatures like Oxford and Bean. The 
 most alarming and unnerving of all dangers to a ruler is that of assassin- 
 ation. Even the best and most blameless sovereign is not wholly secure 
 against it. The hand of Oxford might have killed the Queen. Perhaps 
 however, the best protection a sovereign can have is not to exaggerate the 
 danger. There is no safety in mere severity of punishment. Where the 
 attempt is serious and desperate, it is that of a fanaticism which holds its 
 life in its hand, and is not to be deterred by fear of death. The tortures 
 of Ravaillac did not deter Damiens. The birch in the case of Bean and 
 O'Connor may effectively discountenance enterprises which are born of 
 the mountebank's and not the fanatic's spirit. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE OPIUM WAU. 
 
 THE Opium dispute witli China was going on when the Queen came to 
 the throne. The Opium War broke out soon after. On March 3, 1843, 
 five huge waggons, each of them drawn by four horses, and the whole 
 under escort of a detachment of the 60th Regiment, arrived in front of the 
 Mint. An immense crowd followed the waggons. It was seen that they 
 were filled with boxes ; and one of the boxes having been somewhat broken 
 in its journey, the crowd were able to see that it was crammed full of odd- 
 looking silver coins. The lookers-on were delighted, as well as amused, 
 by the sight of this huge consignment of treasure ; and when it became 
 known that the silver money was the first instalment of the China ransom, 
 there were lusty cheers given as the waggons passed through the gates of 
 the Mint. This was a payment on account of the Avar indemnity imposed 
 on China. Nearly four millions and a half sterling was the sum of the 
 indemnity, in addition to one million and a quarter which had already 
 been paid by the Chinese authorities. Many readers may remember that 
 for some time ' China money ' was regularly set down as an item in the 
 revenues of each year with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had 
 to deal. The China War, of which this money was the spoil, was not per- 
 haps an event of which the motion was entitled to be very proud. It was
 
 1889-43. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 89 
 
 the precursor of other wars; the policy on which it was conducted lifts 
 never since ceased altogether to be a question of more or less excited 
 controversy ; but it may safely be asserted that if the same events were 
 to occur in our day it would be hardly possible to find a Ministry to 
 originate a war, for which at the same time it must be owned that the vast 
 majority of the people, of all politics and classes, were only too ready then 
 to find excuse and even justification. The waggon-loads of silver conveyed 
 into the Mint amid the cheers of the crowd were the spoils of the famous 
 Opium War. 
 
 Reduced to plain words, the principle for which we fought in the 
 China War was the right of Great Britain to force a peculiar trade upon a 
 foreign people in spite of the protestations of the Government and all such 
 public opinion as there was of the nation. Of course this was not the 
 avowed motive of the Avar. Not often in history is the real and inspiring 
 motive of a war proclaimed in so many words by those who carry it on. 
 Not often, indeed, is it seen, naked and avowed, even in the minds of it 
 promoters themselves. As the quarrel between this country and China 
 went on, a great many minor and incidental subjects of dispute arose 
 which for the moment put the one main and original question out (if 
 people's minds ; and in the course of these discussions it happened more 
 than once that the Chinese authorities took some steps which put them 
 decidedly in the wrong. Thus it is true enough that there were particular 
 passnges of the controversy when the English Government had all or 
 nearly all of the right on their side so far as the immediate incident of the 
 dispute was concerned ; and when, if that had been the whole matter of 
 quarrel, or if the quarrel had begun there, a patriotic minister might 
 have been justified in thinking that the Chinese were determined to offend 
 England, and deserved humiliation. But no consideration of this kind can 
 now hide from our eyes the fact that in the beginning and the very origin 
 of the quarrel we were distinctly in the wrong. We asserted, or at least 
 acted on the assertion of, a claim so unreasonable and even monstrous that 
 it never could have been made upon any nation strong enough to render 
 its assertion a matter of serious responsibility. The most important 
 lessons a nation can learn from its own history are found in the exposure 
 of its own errors. Historians have sometimes done more evil than court 
 flatterers when they have gone about to glorify the errors of their own 
 people, and to make wrong appear right, because an English Government 
 talked the public opinion of the time into a confusion of principles. 
 
 The whole principle of Chinese civilisation, at the time when the Opium 
 War broke out, was based on conditions which to any modern nation must 
 seem erroneous and unreasonable. The Chinese governments and people
 
 30 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cu. via, 
 
 desired to have no political relations or dealings whatever with any other 
 State. They were not so obstinately set against private and commercial 
 dealings ; but they would have no political intercourse with foreigners, 
 and they would not even recognise the existence of foreign peoples as 
 States. They were perfectly satisfied with themselves and their own 
 systems. They were convinced that their own systems were not only wise 
 but absolutely perfect. It is superfluous to say that this Avas in itself evi- 
 dence of ignorance and self*conceit. A belief in the perfection of their own 
 systems could only e^st among a people who knew nothing of any other 
 systems. But absurd as the idea must appear to us, yet the Chinese might 
 have found a good deal to say for it. It was the result of a civilisation so 
 ancient that the oldest events preserved in European history were but as 
 yesterday in the comparison. Whatever its errors and defects, it was dis- 
 tinctly a civilisation. It was a system with a literature and laws and 
 institutions of its own; it was a coherent and harmonious social and 
 political system which had on the whole worked tolerably well. It was 
 not very unlike in its principles the kind of civilisation which at one time 
 it was the whim of men of genius, like Rousseau and Diderot, to idealize 
 and admire. The European, of whatever nation, may be said to lilu; 
 change, arid to believe in its necessity. His instincts and his convictions 
 alike tend this way. The sleepiest of Europeans the Neapolitan who 
 lies with his feet in the water on the Chiaja ; the Spaniard, who smokes 
 his cigar and sips his coffee as if life had no active business whatever ; 
 the Jldnettr of the Paris boulevards; the beggar who lounged from cabin 
 to cabin in Ireland a generation ago all these, no matter how little in- 
 clined for change themselves, would be delighted to hear of travel and 
 enterprise, and of new things -ind new discoveries. But to the Chinese, of 
 nil Eastern races, the very idea of travel and change was something repul- 
 sive and odious. As the thought of having to go a day unwashed would 
 be to the educated Englishman of our age, or as the edge of a precipice is 
 to a nervous man, so was the idea of innovation to the Chinese of that 
 time. The ordinary Oriental dreads and detests change ; but the Chinese 
 at that time went as far beyond the ordinary Oriental as the latter goes 
 beyond an average Englishman. In the present day a considerable alter- 
 ation has taken place in this respect. The Chinese have had innovation 
 after innovation forced on them, xmtil at last they have taken up with the 
 new order of things, like people who feel that it is idle to resist their fate any 
 longer. The emigration from China has been as remarkable as that from 
 Ireland or Germany ; and the United States finds itself confronted with a 
 question of the first magnitude when it asks itself what is to be the inrlu- 
 1'iice and operation of the descent of the Chinese populations along the
 
 I8JH -y. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 1)1 
 
 Pacific slope. Japan lias put on modern and European civilisation like a 
 garment. Japan effected in a few years a revolution in the political con- 
 stitution and the social habits of her people, and in their very way of look- 
 ing at things, the like of which no other State ever accomplished in a 
 century. But nothing of all this was thought of at the time of the China 
 War. The one thing which China asked of European civilisation and the 
 tiling called Modern Progress was to be let alone. China's prayer to 
 Europe was that of Diogenes to Alexander ' Stand out of my sunshine.' 
 It was, as we have said, to political relationships rather than to private 
 and commercial dealings with foreign peoples that the Chinese felt an un- 
 conquerable objection. They did not indeed like even private and com- 
 mercial dealings with foreigners. They would much rather have lived 
 without ever seeing the face of a foreigner. But they had put up with 
 the private intrusion of foreigners and trade, and had had dealings with 
 American traders, and with the East India Company. The charter and 
 the exclusive rights of the East India Company expired in April 1834 ; 
 the charter was renewed under different conditions, and the trade with 
 China was thrown open. One of the great branches of the East India 
 Company's business with China was the opium trade. When the trading 
 pr vileges ceased this traffic was taken up briskly by private merchants, 
 who bought of the Company the opium which they grew in India and sold 
 it to the Chinese. The Chinese governments, and all teachers, moralists, 
 and persons of education in China, had long desired to get rid of or put 
 down this trade in opium. They considered it highly detrimental to the 
 morals, the health and the prosperity of the people. Of late the destructive 
 effects of opium have often been disputed, particularly in the House of 
 Commons. It has been said that it is not on the average nearly so un- 
 wholesome as the Chinese governments always thought, and that it does 
 not do as much proportionate harm to China as the use of brandy, whisky, 
 and gin does to England. It seems to this writer hardly possible to doubt 
 that the use of opium is, on the whole, a curse to any nation ; but, even if 
 this were not so, the question between England and the Chinese govern- 
 ments would remain just the same. The Chinese governments may have 
 taken exaggerated views of the evils of the opium trade ; their motives in 
 wishing to put it down may have been mixed with considerations of interest 
 as much political as philanthropic. Lord Palmerston insisted that the 
 Chinese government were not sincere in their professed objection on moral 
 grounds to the traffic. If they were sincere, he asked, why did they not 
 prevent the growth of the poppy in China? It was, he tersely put it, an 
 ' exportation of bullion question, an agricultural protection question ; ' it 
 was a question of the poppy interest in China, and of the economists wh<;
 
 92 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. viu. 
 
 wished to prevent the exportation of the precious metals. It is curious 
 that such arguments as this could have weighed with anyone for a moment. 
 It was no business of ours to ask ourselves whether the Chinese govern- 
 ment were perfectly sincere in their professions of a lofty morality, or 
 whether they, unlike all other governments that have ever been known, 
 were influenced by one sole motive in the making of their regulations. 
 All that had nothing to do with the question. States are not at liberty to 
 help the subjects of other States to break the laws of their own govern- 
 ments. Especially when these laws even profess to concern questions of 
 morals, is it the duty of foreign States not to interfere with the regulations 
 which a government considers it necessary to impose for the protection of 
 its people. All traffic in opium was strictly forbidden by the governments 
 and laws of China. Yet our English traders carried on a brisk and profit- 
 able trade in the forbidden article. Nor was this merely an ordinary 
 smuggling, or a business akin to that of the blockade running during the 
 American civil war. The arrangements with the Chinese Government 
 allowed the existence of all establishments and machinery for carrying on 
 a general trade at Canton and Macao ; and under cover of these arrange- 
 ments the opium traders set up their regular head-quarters in these towns. 
 Let us find an illustration intelligible to readers of the present day, to 
 show how unjustifiable was this practice. The State of Maine, as every- 
 one knows, prohibits the common sale of spirituous liquors. Let us sup- 
 pose that several companies of English merchants were formed in Portland 
 and Augusta, and the other towns of Maine, for the purpose of brewing 
 beer and distilling whisky, and selling both to the public of Maine in 
 defiance of the State laws. Let us further suppose that when the authori- 
 ties of Maine proceeded to put the State laws in force against these in- 
 truders, our Government here took up the cause of the whisky sellers, and 
 sent an ironclad fleet to Portland to compel the people of Maine to put up 
 with them. It seems impossible to think of any English Government 
 taking such a course as this; or of the English public enduring it for one 
 moment. In the case of such a nation as the United States, nothing of 
 the kind would be possible. The serious responsibilities of any such 
 undertaking would make even the most thoughtless minister pause, and 
 would give the public in general some time to think the matter over ; and 
 before any freak of the kind could be attempted the conscience of the 
 nation would be aroused, and the unjust policy would have to be aban- 
 doned. But in dealing Avith China the Ministry never seems to have 
 thought the right or wrong of the question a matter worthy of any con- 
 sideration. The controversy was entered upon with as light a heart as a 
 modern war of still graver moment. The people in general knew nothing
 
 I8S!-40. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 9T 
 
 about the matter until it had gone so far that the original point of dispute 
 was almost out of sight, and it seemed as if the safety of English subjects 
 and the honour of England were compromised in some way by the high- 
 handed proceedings of the Chinese Government. 
 
 The English Government appointed superintendents to manage our 
 commercial dealings with China. Unluckily these superintendents were 
 invested with a sort of political or diplomatic character, and thus from the 
 first became objectionable to the Chinese authorities. One of the first of 
 these superintendents acted in disregard of the express instructions of his 
 own Government. He was told that he must not pass the entrance of the 
 Canton river in a vessel of war, as the Chinese authorities always made a 
 marked distinction between ships of war and merchant vessels in regard to 
 the freedom of intercourse. Misunderstandings occurred at every new step 
 of negotiation. These misunderstandings were natural. Our people knew 
 hardly anything about the Chinese. The limitation of our means of com- 
 munication with them made this ignorance inevitable, but certainly did 
 not excuse our acting as if we were in possession of the fullest and most 
 accurate information. The manner in which some of our official instructors 
 went on was well illustrated by a sentence in the speech of Sir James 
 Graham, during the debate on the whole subject in the House of Commons 
 in April, 1840. It was, Sir James Graham said, as if a foreigner who was 
 occasionally permitted to anchor at the Nore, and at times to land at 
 Wapping, being placed in close confinement during his continuance 
 there, were to pronounce a deliberate opinion upon the resources, the 
 genius, and the character of the British Empire. 
 
 Our representatives were generally disposed to be unyielding; and 
 not only that, but to see deliberate offence in every Chinese usage or 
 ceremony which the authorities endeavoured to impose on them. On the 
 other hand, it is clear that the Chinese authorities thoroiighly detested 
 them and their mission, and all about them, and often made or countenanced 
 delays that were unnecessary, and interferences which were disagreeable 
 and offensive. The Chinese believed from the first that the superinten- 
 dents were there merely to protect the opium trade, and to force on China 
 political relations with the "West. Practically this was the effect of their 
 presence. The superintendents took no steps to aid the Chinese authori- 
 ties in stopping the hated trade. The British traders naturally enough 
 thought that the British Government were determined to protect them in 
 carrying it on. Indeed the superintendents themselves might well have 
 had the same conviction. The Government at home allowed Captain 
 Elliott, the chief superintendent, to make appeal after appeal for instruc- 
 tions without paying the slightest attention to him. Captain Elliott saw
 
 9't A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vm. 
 
 that the opium traders were growing more and more reckless and audacious; 
 that the)' were thrusting their trade iinder the very eyes of the Chinese 
 authorities. lie also saw, as everyone on the spot must have seen, that 
 the authorities, who had been so apathetic for a long time, were now at 
 last determined to go any lengths to put down the traffic. At length the 
 English Government announced to Captain Elliott the decision which they 
 ought to have made known months, not to say years before, that ' her 
 Majesty's Government could not interfere for the purpose of enabling 
 Rritish subjects to violate the laws of the country with which they trade ; ' 
 and that ' any loss therefore which such persons may suffer in consequence 
 of the more effectual execiition of the Chinese laws on this subject must 
 be borne by the parties who have brought that loss on themselves by their 
 own acts.' This very wise and proper resolve came, however, too late. 
 The British traders had been allowed to go on for a long time under the 
 full conviction that the protection of the English Government was behind 
 them and wholly at their service. Captain Elliott himself seems to have 
 now believed that the announcement of his superiors was but a graceful 
 diplomatic figure of speech. When the Chinese authorities actually pro- 
 ceeded to insist on the forfeiture of an immense quantity of the opium in 
 the hands of British traders, and took other harsh, but certainly not un- 
 natural measures to extinguish the traffic, Captain Elliott sent to the 
 Governor of India a request for as many ships of war as could be spared 
 for the protection of the life and property of Englishmen in China. Before 
 long British ships arrived ; and the two countries were at war. 
 
 It is not necessary to describe the successive steps by which the war 
 came on. It was inevitable from the moment that the English superin- 
 tendent identified himself with the protection of the opium trade. The 
 English believed that the Chinese authorities were determined on war, and 
 only waiting for a convenient moment to make a treacherous beginning. 
 The Chinese were convinced that from the first we had meant nothing but 
 war. Such a condition of feeling on both sides wculd probably have 
 made war unavoidable, even in the case of two nations who had far much 
 better ways of understanding each other than the English and Chinese. 
 It is not surprising if the English people at home knew little of the 
 original causes of the controversy. All that presented itself to their mind 
 was the fact that Englishmen were in danger in a foreign country; that 
 they were harshly treated and recklessly imprisoned; that their lives were 
 in jeopardy, and that the flag of England was insulted. There was a 
 general notion too, that the Chinese were a barbarous and a ridiculous 
 people who had no alphabet, and thought themselves much better than 
 an) r other people, even the English, and that, on the whole, it would be a
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 9.^ 
 
 good thing to take the conceit out of them. Those who remember what 
 the common feeling of ordinary society was at the time, will admit that it 
 did not reach a much loftier level than this. The matter was, however, 
 taken up more seriously in Parliament. 
 
 The policy of the Government was challenged in the House of Com- 
 mons, but with results of more importance to the existing composition of 
 the English Cabinet than to the relations between this country and China. 
 Sir James Graham, moved a resolution condemning the policy of Ministers, 
 for having by its uncertainty and other errors brought about the war, 
 which, however, he did not then think it possible to avoid. A debate 
 which continued for three days took place. It was marked by the same 
 curious mixture of parties which we have seen in debates on China ques- 
 tions in days nearer to the present. The defence of the Government was 
 opened by Mr. Macaulay, who had been elected for Edinburgh ;md 
 appointed Secretary at War. The defence consisted chiefly in the argu- 
 ment that we could not have put the trade in opium down, no matter how 
 earnest we had been, and that it was not necessary or possible to keep on 
 issuing frequent instructions to agents so far away as our representatives 
 in China. Mr. Macaulay actually drew from our experience in India an 
 argument in support of his position. We cannot govern India from 
 London, he insisted ; we must, for the most part, govern India in India. 
 One can imagine how Macaulay would in one of his essays have torn into 
 pieces such an argument coming from any advocate of a policy opposed 
 to his own. The reply, indeed, is almost too obvious to need any expo- 
 sition. In India the complete materials of administration were in existence. 
 There was a Governor- General, there were councillors, there was an army. 
 The men best qualified to rule the country were there, provided with all 
 the appliances and forces of rule. In China we had an agent with a vague 
 and anomalous office dropped down in the middle of a hostile people, 
 possessed neither of recognised authority nor of power to enforce its 
 recognition. It was probably true enough that we could not have put 
 down the opium trade ; that even with all the assistance of the Chinese 
 Government we could have done no more than to drive it from one port 
 in order to see it make its appearance at another. But what we ought to 
 have done is, therefore, only the more clear. We ought to have announced 
 from the first, and in the firmest tone, that we would have nothing to do 
 with the trade ; that we would not protect it ; and we ought to have held 
 to this determination. As it was, we allowed our traders to remain under 
 the impression that we were willing to support them, until it was too late 
 to undeceive them with any profit to their safety or our credit. The 
 Chinese authorities acted afte*- while with a high-handed disregard of
 
 96 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vin 
 
 "airness, and of anything like what we should call the responsibility of 
 law; but it is evident that they believed they were themselves the objects 
 of lawless intrusion and enterprise. There were on the part of the 
 Government great efforts made to represent the motion as an attempt to 
 prevent the Ministry from exacting satisfaction from the Chinese Govern- 
 ment, and from protecting the lives and interests of Englishmen in China. 
 But it is unfortunately only too often the duty of statesmen to recognise 
 the necessity of carrying on a war, even while they are of opinion that 
 they whose mismanagement brought about the war deserve condemnation. 
 When Englishmen are being imprisoned and murdered, the innocent just 
 as well as the guilty, in a foreign country when, in short, war is actually 
 going on it is not possible for English statesmen in opposition to say, 
 ' We will not allow England to strike a blow in defence of our fellow- 
 countrymen and our flag, because we are of opinion that better judgment 
 on the part of our Government would have spared us the beginning of 
 such a war.' There was really no inconsistency in recognising the neces- 
 sity of carrying on the war, and at the same time censuring the Ministry 
 who had allowed the necessity to be forced upon us. Sir Robert Peel 
 quoted with great effect, during the debate, the example of Fox, who 
 declared his readiness to give every help to the prosecution of a war which 
 the very same day he proposed to censure the Ministry for having brought 
 upon the country. With all their efforts, the Ministers were only able to 
 command a majority of nine votes as the result of the three days' debate. 
 The war, however, went on. It was easy work enough so far as 
 England was concerned. It was on our side nothing but a succession of 
 cheap victories. The Chinese fought very bravely in a great many 
 instances ; and they showed still more often a Spartan-like resolve not to 
 sui'vive defeat. When one of the Chinese cities was taken by Sir Hugh 
 Gough, the Tartar general went into his house as soon as he saw that all 
 was lost, made his servants set fire to the building, and calmly sat in his 
 chair until he was burned to death. One of the English officers writes of 
 the same attack, that it was impossible to compute the loss of the Chinese, 
 ' for when they found they could stand no longer against us, they cut the 
 throats of their wives and children, or drove them into wells or ponds, 
 and then destroyed themselves. In many houses there were from eight to 
 twelve dead bodies, and I myself saw a dozen women and children 
 drowning themselves in a small pond, the day after the fight.' We 
 quickly captured the island of Chusan, on the east coast o China; a part 
 of our squadron went up the Peiho river to threaten the capital ; negotia- 
 tions were opened, and the preliminaries of a treaty were made out, to 
 which, however, neither the English Government nor the Chinese would
 
 1843. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 97 
 
 agree, and the war was reopened. Chusan was again taken by UH; 
 Ningpo, a large city a few miles in on the mainland, fell into our hands ; 
 Amoy, farther south, was captured ; our troops were before Nankin, when 
 the Chinese Government at last saw how futile was the idea of resisting 
 our arms. Their women or their children might just as well have 
 attempted to encounter our soldiers. With all the bravery which the 
 Chinese often displayed, there was something pitiful, pathetic, ludicrous, 
 in the simple and childlike attempts which they made to carry on war 
 against us. They made peace at last on any terms we chose to ask. We 
 asked in the first instance the cession in perpetuity to us of the island of 
 Hong-Kong. Of course we got it. Then we asked that five ports, Canton, 
 Amoy, Foo-Chow-Foo, Ningpo, and Shanghai, should be thrown open to 
 British traders, and that consuls should be established there. Needless to 
 say that this too was conceded. Then it was agreed that the indemnity 
 already mentioned should be paid by the Chinese Government some ibur 
 millions and a half sterling, in addition to one million and a quartei as 
 compensation for the destroyed opium. It was also stipulated that corre- 
 spondence between officials of the two Governments was thenceforth to be 
 carried on upon equal terms. The war was over for the present, and the 
 thanks of both Houses of Parliament were voted to the fleet and army 
 engaged in the operations. The Duke of Wellington moved the vote of 
 thanks in the House of Lords. He could hardly help, one would think, 
 forming in his mind as he spoke an occasional contrast between the services 
 which he asked the House to honour, and the sort of warfare which it had 
 been his glorious duty to engage in so long. The Duke of Wellington 
 was a simple-minded man, with little sense of humour. He did not pro- 
 bably perceive himself the irony that others might have seen in the fact 
 that the conqueror of Napoleon, the victor in years of warfare against 
 soldiers unsurpassed in history, should have had to move a vote of thanks 
 to the fleet and army which triumphed over the unarmed, helpless, childlike 
 Chinese. 
 
 The whole chapter of history ended, not inappropriately perhaps, witn 
 a rather pitiful dispute between the English Government and the English 
 traders about the amount of compensation to which the latter laid claim 
 for their destroyed opium. The Government were in something of a 
 difficulty ; for they had formally announced that they were resolved to let 
 the traders abide by any loss which their violation of the laws of China 
 might bring upon them. But, on the other hand, they had identified 
 themselves by the war with the cause of the traders ; and one of the con- 
 ditions of peace had been the compensation for the opiiim. The traders 
 insisted that the amount given for this purpose by the Chinese Government 
 
 VOT, T. H
 
 98 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. vm. 
 
 did not nearly meet their losses. The English Government, on the other 
 hand, would not admit that they were bound in any way further to make 
 good the losses of the merchants. The traders demanded to be compen- 
 sated according to the price of opium at the time the seizure was made ; a 
 demand which, if we admit any claim at all, seems only fair and reason- 
 able. The Government had clearly undertaken their cause in the end, 
 and were hardly in a position either logical or dignified, when they after- 
 wards chose to say, ' Yes, we admit that we did imdertake to get you 
 redress, but we do not think now that we are bound to give you full 
 redress.' At last, the matter was compromised ; the merchants had to take 
 what they could get, something considerably below their demand, and give 
 in return to the Government an immediate acquittance in full. It is hard 
 to get up any feeling of sympathy with the traders who lost on such a 
 speculation. It is hard to feel any regret even if the Government which 
 had done so much for them in the war treated them so shabbily when the 
 war was over ; but that they were treated shabbily in the final settlement 
 seems to us to allow of no doubt. 
 
 The Chinese war then was over for the time. But as the children say 
 that snow brings more snow, so did that war with China bring other wars 
 to follow it. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 
 
 THE Melbourne Ministry kept going from bad to worse. There was a 
 great stirring in the country all around them, which made their feebleness 
 the more conspicuous. We sometimes read in history a defence of some 
 particular sovereign whom common opinion cries down, the defence being 
 a reference to the number of excellent measures that were set in motion 
 during his reign. If we were to judge of the Melbourne Ministry on the 
 same principle, it might seem indeed as if their career was one of extreme 
 activity arid fruitfulness. Reforms were astir in almost every direction. 
 Inquiries into the condition of our poor and our labouring classes were, to 
 use a cant phrase of the time, the order of the day. The foundation of the 
 colony of New Zealand was laid with a philosophical deliberation and 
 thoughtfulness which might have reminded one of Locke and the Consti- 
 tution of the Carolinas. Some of the first comprehensive and practical 
 measures to mitigate the rigour and to correct the indiscriminateness oi 
 the death punishment were taken during this period. One of the first 
 legislative enactments which fairly acknowledged the difference between an
 
 tb37-9. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 99 
 
 English wife and a purchased slave, so far as the despotic power of the 
 master was concerned, belongs to the same time. This was the Custody 
 of Infants Bill, the object of which was to obtain for mothers of irreproach- 
 able conduct, who through no fault of theirs were living apart from their 
 husbands, occasional access to their children, with the permission and under 
 the control of the Equity Judges. It is curious to notice how long and how 
 fiercely this modest measure of recognition for what may almost be called 
 the natural rights of a wife and a mother was disputed in Parliament, or 
 at least in the House of Lords. 
 
 It is curious too to notice what a clamour was raised over the small 
 contribution to the cause of national education which was made by the Mel- 
 bourne Government. In 1834 the first grant of public money for the purposes 
 of elementary education was made by Parliament. The sum granted was 
 twenty thousand pounds, and the same grant was made every year 
 until 1839. Then Lord John Russell asked for an increase of ten 
 thousand pounds, and proposed a change in the manner of appro- 
 priating the money. Up to that time the grant had been distributed 
 through the National School Society, a body in direct connection with the 
 Church of England, and the British and Foreign School Association, 
 which admitted children of all Christian denominations without imposing 
 on them sectarian teaching. The money was dispensed by the Lords of 
 the Treasury, who gave aid to applicants in proportion to the size and cost 
 of the school buildings and the number of children who attended them. 
 Naturally, the result of such an arrangement was, that the districts which 
 needed help the most got it the least. If a place was so poor as not to be 
 able to do anything for itself, the Lords of the Treasury would do nothing 
 for it. Naturally too, the rich and powerful Church of England secured 
 the greater part of the grant for itself. There was no inspection of the 
 schools ; no reports were made to Parliament as to the manner in which 
 the system worked ; no steps were taken to find out if the teachers were 
 qualified or the teaching was good. ' The statistics of the schools,' says a 
 writer in the ' Edinburgh Review,' ' were alone considered : the size of 
 the schoolroom, the cost of the building, and the number of scholars.' 
 In 1839 Lord John Russell proposed to increase the grant, and an Order 
 in Council transferred its distribution to a Committee of the Privy Council 
 composed of the President and not more than five members. Lord John 
 Russell also proposed the appointment of inspectors, the founding of a 
 model school for the training of teachers, and the establishment of infant 
 schools. The model school and the infant schools were to be practically 
 unsectarian. The Committee of the Privy Council were to be allowed to 
 depart from the principle of proportioning their grants to the amount of 
 
 H 2
 
 H)0 A HISTOKY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. ix. 
 
 local contribiition, to establish in poor and crowded places schools not 
 necessarily connected with either of the two educational societies, and to 
 extend their aid even to schools where the Roman Catholic version of the 
 Bible was read. The proposals of the Government were fiercely opposed 
 in both Houses of Parliament. The most various and fantastic forms oJ 
 bigotry combined against them. The application of public money, and 
 especially through the hands of the Committee of Privy Council, to any 
 schools not under the control and authority of the Church of England was 
 denounced as a State recognition of popery and heresy. Scarcely less 
 marvellous to us now are the speeches of those who promoted than of 
 those who opposed the scheme. Lord John Russell himself, who was 
 much in advance of the common opinion of those among whom he moved, 
 pleaded for the principles of his measure in a tone rather of apology than 
 of actual vindication. lie did not venture to oppose point blank the claim 
 of those who insisted that it was part of the sacred right of the Established 
 Church to have the teaching all done in her own way or to allow no 
 teaching at all. 
 
 The Government did not get all they sought for. They had a fierce 
 fight for their grant, and an amendment moved by Lord Stanley, to the 
 effect that her Majesty be requested to revoke the Order in Council ap- 
 pointing the Committee on Education, was only negatived by a majority 
 of two votes 275 to 273. In the Lords, to which the struggle was trans- 
 ferred, the Archbishop of Canterbury actually moved and carried by a 
 large majority an address to the Queen praying her to revoke the Order 
 in Council. The Queen replied firmly that the funds voted by Parliament 
 would be found to be laid out in strict accordance with constitutional 
 usage, the rights of conscience, and the safety of the Established Church, 
 and so dismissed the question. The Government therefore succeeded in 
 establishing their Committee of Council on Education, the institution by 
 which our system of public instruction has been managed ever since. The 
 Ministry on the whole showed to advantage in this struggle. They took 
 up a principle and they stood by it. If, as we have said, the speeches 
 made by the promoters of the scheme seem amazing to any intelligent 
 person of our time, because of the feeble, apologetic, and almost craven 
 tone in which they assert the claims of a system of national education, yet 
 it must be admitted that the principle was accepted by the Government at 
 some risk, and that it was not shabbily deserted in the face of hostile 
 pressure. It is worth noticing that while the increased grant and the 
 principles on which it was to be distributed were opposed by such men as 
 Sir Robert Peel, Lord Stanley, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli, it had 
 the support of Mr. O'Connell and of Mr. Smith O'Brien. Both these Irish
 
 1839-40. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 101 
 
 leaders only regretted that the grant was not very much larger, and that it 
 was not appropriated on a more liberal principle. O'Connell was tho 
 recognised leader of the Irish Catholics and nationalists ; Smith O'Brien 
 waa an aristocratic Protestant. With all the weakness of the Whig Minis- 
 try, their term of office must at least be remarkable for the new departure 
 it took in the matter of National Education. The appointment of the 
 Committee of Council marks an epoch. 
 
 Indeed the history of that time seems full of Reform projects. The 
 parliamentary annals contain the names of various measures of social 
 and political improvement which might in themselves, it would seem, bear 
 witness to the most unsleeping activity on the part of any Ministry. 
 Measures for general registration ; for the reduction of the stamp duty on 
 newspapers, and of the duty on paper ; for the improvement of the gaol 
 system ; for the spread of vaccination ; for the regulation of the labour of 
 children ; for the prohibition of the employment of any child or young 
 person under twenty-one in the cleaning* of chimneys by climbing ; for the 
 suppression of the punishment of the pillory ; efforts to relieve the Jews 
 from civil disabilities these are but a few of the many projects of social 
 and political reform that occupied the attention of that busy period, which 
 somehow appears nevertheless to have, been so sleepy and do-nothing. 
 How does it come about that we can regard the Ministry in whose time 
 all these things were done or attempted as exhausted and worthless ? 
 
 One answer is plain. The reforming energy was in the time, and not 
 in the Ministry. In every instance public opinion went far ahead of the 
 inclinations of her Majesty's ministers. There was a just and general 
 conviction that if the Government were left to themselves they would do 
 nothing. When they were driven into any course of improvement they 
 usually did all they could to minimise the amount of reform to be effected. 
 Whatever they undertook they seemed to undertake reluctantly, and as if 
 only with the object of preventing other people from having anything to 
 do with it. Naturally, therefore, they got little or no thanks for any good 
 they might have done. When they brought in a measure to abolish in 
 various cases the punishment of death, they fell so far behind public 
 opinion and the inclinations of the Commission that had for eight years 
 been inquiring into the state of our criminal law, that their bill only passed 
 by very narrow majorities, and impressed many ardent reformers as if it 
 were meant rather to withhold than to advance a genuine reform. In 
 truth, it was a period of enthusiasm and of growth, and the Ministry did 
 not understand this. Lord Melbourne seems to have found it hard to 
 persuade himself that there waa any real anxiety in the mind of anyone 
 to do anything in particular. He had apparently got into his mind the
 
 102 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. ix. 
 
 conviction that the only sensible thing the people of England could do was 
 to keep up the Melbourne Ministry, and that being a sensible people they 
 would naturally do this. He had grown into something like the condition 
 of a pampered old hall-porter, who dozing in his chair begins to look on it 
 as an act of rudeness if any visitor to his master presumes to knock at the 
 door and so disturb him from his comfortable rest. 
 
 Anyone who doubts that it was really a time of enthusiasm in these 
 countries has only to glance at its history. The Church of England and 
 the Church of Scotland were alike convulsed by movements which were 
 the offspring of a genuine and irresistible enthusiasm enthusiasm of that 
 strong far-reaching kind which makes epochs in the history of a church or 
 a people. In Ireland Father Mathew, a pious and earnest friar, who had 
 neither eloquence nor learning nor genius, but only enthusiasm and noble 
 purpose, had stirred the hearts of the population in the cause of temperance 
 as thoroughly as Peter the Hermit might have stirred the heart of a people 
 to a crusade. Many of the efforts of social reform which are still periodi- 
 cally made among ourselves had their beginning then, and can scarcely be 
 said to have made much advance from that day to this. In July, 1840, 
 Mr. Hume moved in the House of Commons for an address to the Throne 
 praying that the British Museum and the National Gallery might be opened 
 to the public after Divine service on Sundays, ' at such hours as taverns, 
 beershops and ginshops are legally open.' The motion was of course re- 
 jected ; but it is worthy of mention now as an evidence of the point to 
 which the spirit of social reform had advanced at a period when Lord 
 Melbourne had seemingly made up his mind that reform had done enough 
 for his generation, and that ministers might be allowed, at least during his 
 time, to eat their meals in peace without being disturbed by the urgencies of 
 restless Radicals or threatened with hostile majorities and Tory successes. 
 
 The Stockdale case was a disturbance of ministerial repose which at 
 one time threatened to bring about a collision between the privileges of 
 Parliament and the authority of the law courts. The Messrs. Hansard, 
 the well-known Parliamentary printers, had published certain Parliamen- 
 tary reports on prisons, in which it happened that a book published by 
 J. J. Stockdale was described as obscene and disgusting in the extreme. 
 Stockdale proceed against the Hansards for libel. The Hansards pleaded 
 the authority of Parliament; but Lord Chief Justice Donman decided that 
 the House of Commons was not Parliament, and had no authority to sanc- 
 tion the publication of libels on individuals. Out of this contradiction of 
 authorities arose a long and often a very unseemly squabble. The Hoiiso 
 of Commons would not give up its privileges ; the law courts would not 
 admit its authority. Judgment was given by default against the Hansards
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 103 
 
 in one of the many actions for libel which arose out of the affair, and the 
 sheriffs of London were called 011 to seize and sell some of the Hansards' 
 property to satisfy the demands of the plaintiff. The unhappy sheriffs 
 were placed, as the homely old saying would describe it, between the 
 devil and the deep sea. If they touched the property of the Hansards, 
 they were acting in contempt of the privilege of the House of Commons 
 and were liable to be committed to Newgate. If, on the other hand, they 
 refused to carry out the orders of the Court of Queen's Bench, that court 
 would certainly send them to prison for the refusal. The reality of their di- 
 lemma in fact was very soon proved. The amount of the damages was paid 
 into the Sheriff's Court, in order to avoid the scandal of a sale, but under 
 protest ; the House of Commons ordered the sheriffs to refund the money 
 to the Hansards ; the Court of Queen's Bench was moved for an order to 
 direct the sheriffs to pay it over to Stockdale. The sheriffs were finally 
 committed to the custody of the sergeant-at-arms for contempt of the 
 House of Commons. The Court of Queen's Bench served a writ of habeas 
 corpus on the sergeant-at-arms, calling on him to produce the sheriffs in 
 court. The House directed the sergeant-at-arms to inform the court that 
 he held the sheriffs in custody by order of the Commons. The sergeant- 
 at-arms took the sheriffs to the Court of Queen's Bench and made his 
 statement there ; his explanation was declared reasonable and sufficient, 
 and he marched his prisoners back again. A great deal of this ridiculous 
 sort of thing went on which it is not now necessary to describe in any 
 detail. The House of Commons, what with the arrest of the sheriffs and 
 of agents act ing on behalf of the pertinacious Stockdale, had on their hands 
 batches of prisoners with whom they did not know in the least Avhat to do ; 
 the whole affair created immense popular excitement mingled with much 
 ironical laughter. At last the House of Commons had recourse to legis- 
 
 o o 
 
 lation, and Lord John Russell brought in a bill on March 3, 1840, to afford 
 summary protection to all persons employed in the publication of Parlia- 
 mentary papers. The preamble of the measure declared that ' Whereas it 
 is essential to the due and effectual discharge of the functions and duties 
 of Parliament that no obstruction should exist to the publication of the 
 reports, papers, votes, or proceedings of either House as such House should 
 deem fit,' it is to be lawful ' for any person or persons against whom any 
 civil or criminal proceedings shall be taken on account of such publication 
 to bring before the court a certificate under the hand of the Lord Chan- 
 cellor or the Speaker, stating that it was published by the authority of the 
 House, and the proceedings should at once be stayed.' This bill was run 
 quickly through both Houses not without some opposition or at least 
 murmur in the Upper House and it became law on April 14. It settled the
 
 104 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. at. t*. 
 
 question satisfactorily enough, although it certainly did not define the relative 
 rights of Parliament and the courts of law. No difficulty of the same kind has 
 since arisen. The sheriffs and the other prisoners were discharged from 
 custody after a while, and the public excitement went out in quiet 
 laughter. 
 
 The question, however, was a very serious one ; and it is significant 
 that public opinion was almost entirely on the side of the law courts and 
 the sheriffs. The Ministry must have so fallen in public favour as to 
 bring the House of Commons into disrepute along with them, or such a 
 sentiment could not have prevailed so widely out of doors. The public 
 seemed to see nothing in the whole affair but a tyrannical House of 
 Commons wielding illimitable powers against a few humble individuals, 
 some of whom, the sheriffs for instance, had no share in the controversy 
 except that imposed on them by official duty. Accordingly the sheriffs 
 were the heroes of the hour, and were toasted and applauded all over the 
 country. Assuredly it was an awkward position for the House of Commons 
 to be placed in when it had to vindicate its privileges by committing to 
 prison men who were merely doing a duty which the law courts imposed 
 on them. It would have been better probably if the Government had 
 more firmly asserted the rights of the House of Commons at the beginning, 
 and thus allowed the public to see the real question which the whole con- 
 troversy involved. Nothing can be more clear now than the paramount 
 importance of securing to each House of Parliament an absolute authority 
 and freedom of publication. No evil that could possibly arise out of the 
 misuse of such a power could be anything like that certain to come of a 
 state of things which restricted, by libel laws or otherwise, the right of either 
 House to publish whatever it thought proper for the public good. Not a 
 single measure for the reform of any great grievance, from the abolition of 
 slavery to the passing of the Factory Acts, but might have been obstructed, 
 and perhaps even prevented, if the free exposure of existing evils were 
 denied to the Houses of Parliament. In this country, Parliament only 
 works through the- power of public opinion. A social reform is not carried 
 out simply by virtue of the decision of a cabinet that something ought to 
 be done. The attention of the Legislature and of the public has to be 
 called to the grievance again and again by speeches, resolutions, debate? 
 and divisions, before there is any chance of carrying a measure on the 
 subject. Wlu'ii public opinion is ripe, and is strong enough to help the 
 Government through with a reform in spite of prejudices and vested in- 
 terests, then, and not till then, the reform is carried. Rut it would be 
 hardly possible to bring the matter up to thir, stage of growth if those who 
 were interested in upholding a grievance had the power of worrying the
 
 V840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 10."i 
 
 publishers of the Parliamentary reports by legal proceedings in the earlier 
 stages of the discussion. Nor would it be of any use to protect merely the 
 freedom of debate in Parliament itself. It is not through debate, but 
 through publication, that the public opinion of the country is reached. 
 In truth, the poorer a man is, the weaker and the humbler, the greater 
 need is there that he should call out for the full freedom of publication to 
 be vested in the hands of Parliament. The factory child, the climbing 
 boy, the apprentice under colonial systems of modified slavery, the seaman 
 sent to sea in the rotten ship ; the woman clad in unwomanly rags who 
 sings her ' Song of a Shirt' ; the other woman almost literally unsexed in 
 form, function ;ind soul, who in her filthy trowsers of sacking dragged on 
 all fours the coal trucks in the mines these are the tyrants and the 
 monopolists for whom we assert the privilege of Parliamentary publi- 
 cation. 
 
 The operations which took place about this time in Syria belong 
 perhaps rather to the general history of the Ottoman Empire than to that 
 fjf England. But they had so important a bearing on the relations between 
 this country and France, and are so directly connected with subsequent 
 events in which England bore a leading part, that it would be impossible 
 to pass them over without some notice here. Mohammed Ali, Pasha of 
 Egypt, the most powerful of all the Sultan's feudatories, a man of iron 
 will and great capacity both for war and administration, had made himself 
 tor a time master of Syria. By the aid of the warlike qualities of his 
 adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, he had defeated the armies of the Porte 
 wherever he had encountered them. Mohammed's victories had for the 
 time compelled the Porte to allow him to remain in power in Syria; but 
 the Sultan had long been preparing to try another effort for the reduction 
 of his ambitious vassal. In 1839 the Sultan again declared war against 
 Mohammed Ali. Ibrahim Pasha again obtained an overwhelming victory 
 over the Turkish army. The energetic Sultan Mahmoud, a man not, 
 unworthy to cope with such an adversary as Mohammed Ali, died suddenly ; 
 and immediately after his death the Capitan Pasha, or Lord High Admiral 
 of the Ottoman fleet, went over to the Egyptians with all his vessels; an 
 act of almost unexampled treachery even in the history of the Ottoman 
 Empire. It was evident that Turkey was not able to hold her own against 
 the formidable Mohammed and his successful son ; and the policy of the 
 Western powers of Europe, and of England especially, had long been to 
 maintain the Ottoman Empire as a necessary part of the common State 
 system. The policy of Russia was to keep up that empire as long as it 
 suited her own purposes; to take care that no other Power got anything 
 out of Turkey; and to prepare the way for such a partition of the spoils
 
 106 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. IT. 
 
 of Turkey as would satisfy Russian interests. Russia therefore was to be 
 found now defending Turkey, and now assailing her. The course taken 
 by Russia was seemingly inconsistent ; but it was only inconsistent as the 
 course of a sailing ship may be which now tacks to this side and now to 
 that, but has a clear object in view and a port to reach all the while. 
 England was then and for a long time after steadily bent on preserving 
 the Turkish Empire, and in a great measure as a rampart against the 
 schemes and ambitions imputed to Russia herself. France was less firmly 
 set on the maintenance of Turkey ; and France, moreover, had got it into 
 her mind that England had designs of her own on Egypt. Austria was 
 disposed to go generally with England ; Prussia was little more than a 
 nominal sharer in the alliance that was now tinkered up. It is evident 
 that such an alliance could not be very harmonious or direct in its action. 
 It was, however, effective enough to prove too strong for the Pasha of 
 Egypt. A fleet made up of English, Austrian and Turkish vessels bom- 
 barded Acre ; an allied army drove the Egyptians from several of their 
 strongholds. Ibrahim Pasha, with all his courage and genius, was not 
 equal to the odds against which he now saw himself forced to contend. 
 He had to succumb. No one could doubt that he and his father Avere 
 incomparably better able to give good government and the chances of 
 development to Syria than the Porte had ever been. But in this instance 
 as in other?, the odious principle was upheld by England and her actual 
 allies, that the Turkish Empire must be maintained, at no matter what 
 cost of suffering and degradation to its subject populations. Mohammed 
 Ali was deprived of all his Asiatic possessions ; but was seciired in his 
 government of Egypt. A convention signed at London on July 15, 1840, 
 arranged for the imposition of those terms on Mohammed Ali. 
 
 The convention was signed by the representatives of Great Britain, 
 Austria, Prussia and Russia, on the one part, and of the Ottoman Porte 
 on the other. The name of France was not found there. France had 
 drawn back from the alliance, and for some time seemed as if she were 
 likely to take arms against it. M. Thiers was then her Prime Minister: 
 he was a man of quick fancy, restless and ambitious temperament, and 
 what we cannot help calling a vulgar spirit of national self-sufficiency 
 we are speaking now of the Thiers of 1840, not of the wise and capable 
 statesman, tempered and tried by the fire of adversity, who reorganised 
 France out of the ruin and welter of 1870. Thiers persuaded himself and 
 the great majority of his countrymen that England was bent upon driving 
 Mohammed Ali out of Egypt as well as out of Syria, and that her object 
 was to obtain possession of Egypt for herself. For some months it seemed 
 as if war were inevitable between England and France, although there was
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES 107 
 
 not, in reality, the slightest reason why the two States should quarrel. 
 France was just as far away from any thought of a really disinterested 
 foreign policy as England. England, on the other hand, had not the 
 remotest idea of becoming the possessor of Egypt. Fortunately, Louis 
 Philippe and M. Guizot were both strongly in favour of peace; M. Thiers 
 resigned ; and M. Guizot became Minister for Foreign Affairs, and virtually 
 head of the Government. Thiers defended his policy in the French 
 Chamber in a scream of passionate and almost hysterical declamation. 
 Again and again he declared that his mind had been made up to go to war 
 if England did not at once give way and modify the terms of the conven- 
 tion of July. It cannot be doubted that Thiers carried with him much of 
 the excited public feeling of France. But the King and M. Guizot were 
 happily supported by the majority in and out of the Chambers ; and on 
 July 13, 1841, the Treaty of London was signed, which provided for the 
 settlement of the affairs of Egypt on the basis of the arrangement already 
 made, and which contained, moreover, the stipulation, to be referred to 
 more than once hereafter, by which the Sultan declared himself firmly 
 resolved to maintain the ancient principle of his empire that no foreign 
 ship of war was to be admitted into the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, 
 with the exception of light vessels for which a firman was granted. 
 
 The public of this country had taken but little interest in the contro- 
 versy about Egypt, at least until it seemed likely to involve England in a 
 war with France. Some of the episodes of the war were indeed looked 
 upon with a certain satisfaction by people here at home. The bravery of 
 Charles Napier, the hot-headed self-conceited commander, was enthusias- 
 tically extolled, and his feats of successful audacity were glorified as though 
 they had shown the genius of a Nelson, or the clever resource of a 
 Cochrane. Not many of Napier's admirers cared a rush about the merits 
 of the quarrel between the Porte and the Pasha. Most of them would 
 have been just as well pleased if Napier had been fighting for the Pasha 
 and against the Porte ; not a few were utterly ignorant as to whether he 
 was fighting for Porte or for Pasha. Those who claimed to be more 
 enlightened had a sort of general idea that it was in some way essential to 
 the safety and glory of England that whenever Turkey was in trouble we 
 should at once become her champions, tame her rebels, and conquer her 
 enemies. Unfounded as were the suspicions of Frenchmen about our 
 designs upon Egypt, they can hardly be called very unreasonable. Even a 
 very cool and impartial Frenchman might be led to the conclusion that 
 free England would not without some direct purpose of her own have 
 pledged herself to the cause of a base and a decaying despotism. 
 
 Steadily meanwhile did the Ministry go from bad to worse. They
 
 108 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. ix 
 
 had greatly damaged their character by the manner in which they had 
 again and again put up with defeat and consented to resume or retain 
 office on any excuse or pretext. They were remarkably bad adminis- 
 trators ; their finances were wretchedly managed. In later times we have 
 come to regard the Tories as especially weak in the matter of finance. A 
 well-managed revenue and a comfortable surplus are generally looked 
 upon as in some way or other the monopoly of a Liberal administration ; 
 while lavish expenditure, deficit and increased taxation are counted 
 among the necessary accompaniments of a Tory Government. So nearly 
 does public opinion on both sides go to accepting these conditions, that 
 there are many Tories who take it rather as a matter of pride that their 
 leaders are not mean economists, and who regard a free-handed expendi- 
 ture of the national revenue as something peculiarly gentlemanlike and in 
 keeping with the honourable traditions of a great country party. But this 
 was not the idea which prevailed in the days of the Melbourne Ministry. 
 Then the universal conviction was that the Whigs were incapable of manag- 
 ing their finances. The budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. 
 Baring, showed a deficiency of nearly two millions. This deficiency he 
 proposed to meet in part by alteration in the sugar duties ; but the House 
 of Commons, after a long debate, rejected his proposals by a majority of 
 thirty-six. It was then expected, of course, that ministers would resign ; 
 but they were not yet willing to accept the consequences of defeat. They 
 thought they had another stone in their sling. Lord John Russell had 
 previously given notice of his intention to move for a committee of the 
 whole House to consider the state of legislation with regard to the trade 
 in corn ; and he now brought forward an announcement of his plan, 
 which was to propose a fixed duty of eight shillings per quarter on wheat, 
 and proportionately diminished rates on rye, barley, and oats. Except 
 for its effect on the fortunes of the Melbourne Ministry, there is not die 
 slightest importance to be attached to this proposal. It was an experi- 
 ment in the direction of the Free Traders, who were just beginning to be 
 powerful ; although they were not nearly strong enough yet to dictate the 
 policy of a government. We shall have to tell the story of Free Trade 
 hereafter ; this present incident is no part of the history of a great, move- 
 ment ; it is merely a small party dodge. It deceived no one. Lord 
 Melbourne had always spoken with the uttermost contempt of the Free 
 Trade agitation. With characteristic oaths, he had declared that of all 
 the mad things he had ever heard suggested Free Trade was the maddest. 
 Lord John Russell himself, although far more enlightened than the Prime 
 Minister, had often condemned and sneered at the demand for Free Trade. 
 The conversion of the ministers into the official advocates of a moderate
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 109 
 
 fixed duty was all too sudden for the conscience, for the very stomach of 
 the nation. Public opinion would not endure it. Nothing but harm 
 came to the Whigs from the attempt. Instead of any new adherents or 
 fresh sympathy being won for them by their proposal, people only asked, 
 ' Will nothing then turn them out of office ? Will they never have done 
 with trying new tricks to keep in place? ' 
 
 Sir Robert Peel took, in homely phrase, the bull by the horns. lie 
 proposed a direct vote of want of confidence a resolution declaring that 
 ministers did not possess the confidence of the House sufficiently to enable 
 them to carry through the measures which they deemed of essential im- 
 portance to the public welfare, and that their continuance in office under 
 euch circumstances was at variance with the spirit of the Constitution. 
 On June 4, 1841, the division was taken; and the vote of no-confidence 
 was carried by a majority of one. Even the Whigs could not stand this. 
 Lord Melbourne at last began to think that things were looking serious. 
 Parliament was dissolved, and the result of the general election was that 
 the Tories were found to have a majority even greater than they them- 
 selves had anticipated. The moment the new Parliament was assembled 
 amendments to the address Avere carried in both Houses in a sense hostile 
 to the Government. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had to resign, 
 and Sir Robert Peel was entrusted with the task of forming an adminis- 
 tration. 
 
 We have not much more to do with Lord Melbourne in this history. 
 He merely drops out of it. Between his expulsion from office and his 
 death, which took place in 1818, he did little or nothing to call for the 
 notice of anyone. It Avas said at one time that his closing years Avere 
 lonesome and melancholy ; but this has lately been denied, and indeed it 
 is not likely that one Avho had such a genial temper and so many friends 
 could have been left to the dreariness of a not self-sufficing solitude and 
 to the bitterness of neglect. He Avas a generous and kindly man ; his 
 personal character, although often assailed, was free of any serious 
 reproach ; he was a failure in office, not so much from Avant of ability, as 
 because he Avas a politician without convictions. 
 
 The Peel Ministry came into poAver Avith great hopes. It had Lord 
 Lyndhurst for Lord Chancellor ; Sir James Graham for Home Secretary ; 
 Lord Aberdeen at the Foreign Office ; Lord Stanley Avas Colonial Secre- 
 tary. The most remarkable man not in the Cabinet, soon to be one of 
 the foremost statesmen in the country, Avas Mr. W. E. Gladstone. It is a 
 fact of some significance in the history of the Peel administration, that the 
 elections Avhich brought the new Ministry into power brought Mr. Cobden 
 for the first time into the House of Commons.
 
 110 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 
 
 WHILE Lord Melbourne and his Whig colleagues, still in office, were 
 fribbling away their popularity on the pleasant assumption that nobody 
 was particularly in earnest about anything, the Vice-Chancellor and heads 
 of houses held a meeting at Oxford and passed a censure on the celebrated 
 ' No. 90,' of ' Tracts for the Times.' The movement, of which some im- 
 portant tendencies were formally censured in the condemnation of this 
 tract, was one of the most momentous that had stirred the Church of 
 England since the Reformation. The author of the tract was Dr. John 
 Henry Newman, and the principal ground for its censure by voices claim- 
 ing authority was the principle it seemed to put forward that a man 
 might honestly subscribe all the articles and formularies of the English 
 Church, while yet holding many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome, 
 against which those articles were regarded as a necessary protest. The 
 great movement which was thus brought into sudden question and pub- 
 licity was in itself an offspring of the immense stirring of thought which 
 the French Revolution called up, and which had its softened echo in the 
 English Reform Bill. The centre of the religious movement was to be 
 found in the University of Oxford. When it is in the right, and when it 
 is in the wrong, Oxford has always had more of the sentimental and of 
 the poetic in its cast of thought than its rival or colleague of Cambridge. 
 There were two influences then in operation over England, both of which 
 alike aroused the alarm and the hostility of certain gii'ted and enthusiastic 
 young Oxford men. One was the tendency to Rationalism drawn from 
 the German theologians ; the other was the manner in which the connec- 
 tion of the Church with the State in England was beginning to operate to 
 the disadvantage of the Church as a sacred institution and teacher. The 
 Reform party everywhere were assailing the rights and property of the 
 Church. In Ireland especially experiments were made which every 
 practical man will now regard with approval, whether he be churchman 
 or not, but which seemed to the devoted ecclesiast of Oxford to be fraught 
 with danger to the freedom and influence of the Church. Out of the 
 contemplation of these dangers sprang the desire to revive the authority 
 of the Church ; to quicken her with a new vitality ; to give her once 
 again that place as guide and inspirer of the national life which her 
 ardent votaries believed to be hers by right, and to have been forfeited
 
 IK41. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Ill 
 
 only by the carelessness of her authorities and their failure to fulfil the 
 duties of her heaven-assigned mission. 
 
 No movement could well have had a purer source. None could have 
 had more disinterested and high-minded promoters. It was borne in 
 upon some earnest unresting souls, like that of the sweet and saintly 
 Keble souls ' without haste and without rest,' like Goethe's star that 
 the Church of England had higher duties and nobler claims than the 
 business of preaching harmless sermons and the power of enriching bishops. 
 Keble could not bear to think of the Church taking pleasure since all is 
 well. He urged on some of the more vigorous and thoughtful minds 
 around him, or rather he suggested it by his influence and his example, 
 that they should reclaim for the Church the place which ought to be hers, 
 as the true successor of the Apostles. He claimed for her that she, and 
 she alone, was the real Catholic Church, and that Rome had wandered 
 away from the right path, and foregone the glorious mission which she 
 might have maintained. Among those who shared the spirit and purpose 
 of Keble were Richard Hurrell Froude, the historian's elder brother, who 
 gave rich promise of a splendid career, but who died while still in com- 
 parative youth ; Dr. Pusey, afterwards leader of the school of ecclesias- 
 ticism which bears his name; and, most eminent of all, Dr. Newman. 
 Keble had taken part in the publication of a series of treatises called 
 'Tracts for the Times,' the object of which was to vindicate the real 
 mission, as the writers believed, of the Church of England. This was 
 the Tractarian movement which had such various and memorable results. 
 Newman first started the project of the Tracts, and wrote the most re- 
 markable of them. He had up to this time been distinguished as one of 
 the most unsparing enemies of Rome. At the same time he was, as he 
 has himself said, ' fierce ' against the ' instruments ' and the ' manifesta- 
 tions ' of ' the Liberal cause.' While he was at Algiers once a French 
 vessel put in there, flying the tricolour ; Newman would not even look at 
 her. ' On my return, though forced to stop twenty-four hours at Paris, I 
 kept indoors the whole time, and all that I saw of that beautiful city was 
 what I saw from the diligence.' He had never had any manner of asso- 
 ciation with Roman Catholics ; had, in fact, known singularly little of 
 them. As Newman studied and wrote concerning the best way to restore 
 the Church of England to her proper place in the national life, he kept 
 the thought before him ' that there was something greater than the Esta- 
 blished Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set 
 tip from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and the 
 organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with 
 strongly or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation.
 
 112 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. x. 
 
 At this time the idea of leaving the Church never, Dr. Newman himself 
 assures us, had crossed his imagination. He felt alarmed for the Church 
 between German Rationalism and man-of-the-world Liberalism. His fear 
 was that the Church would sink to be the servile instrument of a State, 
 and a Liberal State. 
 
 The abilities of Dr. Newman were hardly surpassed by any contem- 
 porary in any department of thought. His position and influence iiv 
 Oxford were almost unique. There was in his intellectual temperament 
 a curious combination of the mystic and the logical. He was at once a 
 poetic dreamer and a sophist in the true and not the corrupt and un- 
 generous sense of the latter word. It had often been said of him and of 
 another great Englishman, that a change in their early conditions and 
 training would easily have made of Newman a Stuart Mill, and of Mill 
 a Newman. England in our time has hardly had a greater master of 
 argument and of English prose than Newman. He is one of the keenest 
 of dialecticians ; and like Mill has the rare art that dissolves all the diffi- 
 culties of the most abstruse or perplexed subject, and shows it bare and 
 clear even to the least subtle of readers. His words dispel mists ; and 
 whether they who listen agree or not, they cannot fail to understand. A 
 penetrating, poignant satirical humour is found in most of his writings ; 
 an irony sometimes piercing suddenly through it like a darting pain. On 
 the other hand, a generous vein of poetry and of pathos informs his style ; 
 and there are many passages of his works in which he rises to the height 
 of a genuine and noble eloquence. 
 
 In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, Newman was 
 strikingly deficient. His manner was constrained, ungraceful and even 
 awkward; his voice was thin and weak. His bearing was not at first 
 impressive in any way. A gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp and eagle face, 
 a cold meditative eye rather repelled than attracted those who saw him ibr 
 the first time. Singularly devoid of affectation, Newman did not always 
 conceal his intellectual scorn of men who made loud pretence with inferior 
 e:ifts, and the men must have been few indeed whose gifts were not in- 
 ferior to his. Newman had no scorn for intellectual inferiority in itself; 
 he despised it only when it gave itself airs. His influence while he was 
 the vicar of St. Mary's at Oxford was profound. As Mr. Gladstone said 
 of him in a recent speech, ' without ostentation or effort, but by simple 
 excellence, he was continually drawing undergraduates more and more 
 around him.' Mr. Gladstone in the same speech gave a description of 
 Dr. Newman's pulpit style which is interesting : ' Dr. Newman's manner 
 in the pulpit was one which, if you considered it in its separate parts, 
 would lead you to arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There was 
 not very much change in the inflection of the voice ; action there waa
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 113 
 
 none ; his sermons were read and his eyes were always on his book ; and 
 all that you will say is against efficiency in preaching. Yes ; but you 
 take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him, 
 there was a solemn music and sweetness in his tone, there was a complete- 
 ness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the manner, 
 which made even his delivery such as I have described it, arid though 
 exclusively with written sermons, singularly attractive.' The stamp and 
 seal were indeed those which are impressed by genius, piety and earnest- 
 ness. No opponent ever spoke of Newman but with admiration for his 
 intellect and respect for his character. Dr. Newman had a younger 
 brother, Francis W. Newman, who also possessed remarkable ability and 
 earnestness. He too was distinguished at Oxford and seemed to have a 
 great career there before him. But he was drawn one way by the wave 
 of thought before his more famous brother had been drawn the other 
 way. In 1830, the younger Newman found himself prevented by religious 
 scruples from subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles for his master's degree. 
 He left the university, and wandered for years in the East, endeavouring, 
 not very successfully perhaps, to teach Christianity on its broadest base to 
 Mahometans ; and then he came back to England to take his place among 
 the leaders of a certain school of free thought. Fate had dealt with 
 those brothers as with the two friends in Richter's story : it ' seized their 
 bleeding hearts, and flung them different ways.' 
 
 When Dr. Newman wrote the famous Tract ' No. 90,' for which he 
 was censured, he bowed to the authority of his bishop if not to that of the 
 heads of houses ; and he discontinued the publication of such treatises. 
 But he did not admit any change of opinion ; and indeed soon after he 
 edited a publication called ' The British Critic,' in which many of the 
 principles held to be exclusively those of the Church of Rome were 
 enthusiastically claimed for the English Church. Yet a little and the 
 gradual working of Newman's mind became evident to all the world. 
 The brightest and most penetrating intellect in the Church of England 
 was withdrawn from her service, and Newman went over to the Church 
 of Rome. His secession was described by Mr. Disraeli a quarter of a 
 century afterwards as having ' dealt a blow to the Church of England 
 xmder which she still reels.' To this result had the inquiry conducted 
 him which had led his friend Dr. Pusey merely to endeavour to incor- 
 porate some of the mysticism and the symbols of Rome with the ritual of 
 the English Protestant Church ; which had brought Keble only to seek a 
 more liberal and truly Christian temper for the faith of the Protestant ; 
 and which had sent Francis Newman into Radicalism and Rationalism. 
 
 In truth, it is not difficult now to understand how the elder Newman's 
 
 ^OL I. I
 
 114 A HISTORY OF OUE OWJS TIMES. at. *. 
 
 mind became drawn towards the ancient Church which won him at last. 
 We can see from his own candid account of his early sentiments how 
 profoundly mystical was his intellectual nature, and how, long before he 
 was conscious of any such tendency, he was drawn towards the very 
 symbolisms of the Catholic Church. Pascal's early and unexplained 
 mastery of mathematical problems which no one had taught him is not 
 more suggestive in its way than those early drawings of Catholic symbols 
 and devices which, done in his childhood, Newman says, surprised and 
 were inexplicable to him when he came on them in years long after. No 
 place could be better fitted to encourage and develop this tendency to 
 mysticism in a thoughtful mind than Oxford, with all its noble memories 
 of scholars and of priests ; with its picturesque and poetic surroundings, 
 and its never-fading medievalism. Newman lived in the past. His spirit 
 vas with mediaeval England. His thoughts were of a time when one 
 Church took charge of the souls of a whole united devout people, and 
 stood as the guide and authority appointed for them by Heaven. He 
 thought of such a time until first he believed in it as a thing of the past, 
 and next came to have faith in the possibility of its restoration as a thing 
 of the present and the future. When once he had come to this point the 
 rest followed, ' as by lot God wot. 1 No creature could for a moment sup- 
 pose that that ideal Church was to be found in the English Establishment, 
 submitted as it was to State-made doctrine, and to the decision of the 
 Lord Chancellor, who might be an infidel or a free-liver. The question 
 which Cardinal Manning tells us he asked himself years after at the time 
 of the Gorham case must often have presented itself to the mind of 
 Newman. Suppose all the Bishops of the Church of England should 
 decide unanimously on any question of doctrine, would anyone receive the 
 decision as infallible ? Of course not. Such is not the genius or the prin- 
 ciple of the English Church. The Church of England has no pretension 
 to be considered the infallible guide of the people in matters even of 
 doctrine. Wore she seriously to put forward any such pretension, it 
 would be rejected with contempt by the common mind of the nation. 
 We are not discussing questions of dogma, or the rival claims of churches 
 here ; we are merely pointing out that to a man with Newman's idea of a 
 church, the Church of England could not long afford a home. That very 
 logical tendency, which in the mind of Newman as of that of Pascal con- 
 tended for supremacy with the tendency to devotion and mysticism, only 
 impelled him more rigorously on his way. He could not put up with 
 compromises, and convince himself that he ought to be. convinced, lie 
 dragged every compromise and every doctrine into the light, and insisted 
 on knowing exactly what it amounted to and what it meant to say. The
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 115 
 
 doctrines and compromises of his own Church did not satisfy him. There 
 are minds which in this condition of bewilderment might have been con- 
 tent to find ' no footing so solid as doubt.' Newman had not a mind of 
 that class. He could not believe in a world without a church, or a 
 church without what he held to be inspiration ; and accordingly he threw 
 his whole soul, energy, genius and fame into the cause of the Church of 
 Rome. 
 
 This, however, did not come all at once. We are anticipating by a 
 few years the passing over of Dr. Newman, Cardinal Manning and others 
 to the ancient Church. It is clear that Newman was not himself conscious 
 for a long time of the manner in which he was being drawn, surely 
 although not quickly, in the direction of Rome. He used to be accused 
 at one time of having remained a conscious Roman Catholic in the 
 English Church, labouring to make new converts. Apart from his own 
 calm assurances, and from the singularly pure and candid nature of the 
 man, there are reasons enough to render such a charge absurd. Indeed, 
 that simple and childish conception of human nature which assumes that 
 a man must always see the logical consequences of certain admissions or 
 inquiries beforehand, because all men can see them afterwards, is rather 
 confusing and out of place when we are considering such a crisis of 
 thought and feeling as that which took place in Oxford, and such men as 
 those who were principally concerned in it. For the present, it is enough 
 to say that the object of that movement was to raise the Church of 
 England from apathy, from dull, easy-going acquiescence, from the per- 
 functory discharge of formal duties, and to quicken her again with the 
 spirit of a priesthood, to arouse her to the living work, spiritual and 
 physical, of an ecclesiastical sovereignty. The impulse overshot itself in 
 some cases and was misdirected in others. It proved a failure on the 
 whole as to its definite aims ; and it sometimes left behind it only the 
 ashes of a barren symbolism. But in its source it was generous, beneficent 
 and noble, and it is hard to believe that there has not been throughout the 
 Church of England on the whole a higher spirit at work since the famous 
 Oxford movement began. 
 
 Still greater was the practical importance, at least in defined results, 
 of the movement which went on in Scotland at about the same time. A 
 fortnight before the decision of the heads of houses at Oxford on 
 Dr. Newman's tract, Lord Aberdeen announced in the House of Lords 
 that he did not see his way to do anything in particular with regard to 
 the dissensions in the Church of Scotland. He had tried a mea?Aire, lie 
 said, the year before, and half the Church of Scotland liked it and the 
 other half denounced it, rind the Government opposed it ; and he, thera- 
 
 T 2
 
 116 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. x. 
 
 fore, had nothing further to suggest in the matter. The perplexity oi 
 Lord Aberdeen only faintly typified the perplexity of the Ministry. Lord 
 Melbourne was about the last man in the world likely to have any sym- 
 pathy with the spirit which animated the Scottish Reformers, or any notion 
 of how to get out of the difficulty which the whole question presented. 
 Differing as they did in so many other points, there was one central resem- 
 blance between the movement in the Kirk of Scotland and that which was 
 going on in the Church of England. In both cases alike the effort of the 
 reforming party was to emancipate the Church from the control of the 
 State in matters involving religious doctrine and duty. In Scotland was 
 soon to be presented the spectacle of a great secession from an Established 
 Church, not because the seceders objected to the principle of a Church, 
 out because they held that the Establishment was not faithful enough to 
 its mission as a Church. One of the seceders pithily explained the position 
 of the controversy when he said that he and his fellows were leaving 
 the Kirk of Scotland, not because she was too ' churchy,' biit because she 
 was not ' churchy ' enough. 
 
 The case was briefly this. During the reign of Queen Anne an Act 
 was passed which took from the Church courts in Scotland the free choice 
 as to the appointment of pastors, by subjecting the power of the presbytery 
 to the control and interference of the law courts. Harley, Bolingbroke, 
 and Swift, not one of whom cared a rush about the supposed sanctity of 
 an ecclesiastical appointment, were the authors of this compromise, which 
 was exactly of the kind that sensible men of the world everywhere might 
 be supposed likely to accept and approve. In an immense number of 
 Scotch parishes the minister was nominated by a lay patron ; and if the 
 presbytery found nothing to condemn in him as to ' life, literature and 
 doctrine,' they were compelled to appoint him, however unwelcome he 
 might be to the parishioners. Now it is obvious that a man might have a 
 blameless character, sound religious vieAvs, and an excellent education, 
 and nevertheless be totally unfitted to undertake the charge of a Scottish 
 parish. The Southwark congregation who appreciate and delight in the 
 ministrations of Mr. Spurgeon might very well be excused if they objected 
 to having a perfectly moral Charles Honeyman, even though his religious 
 opinions were identical with those of their favourite, forced upon them at 
 the will of some aristocratic lay patron. The effect of the power con- 
 ferred on the law courts and the patron was simply in a great number of 
 cases to send families away from the Church of Scotland and into volun- 
 taryism. The Scotch people are above all others impatient of any attempt 
 to force on them the services of unacceptable ministers. Men clung to 
 the National Church as long as it was national that is, as lon^ as it 
 
 '- ' o
 
 1840. A HISTORY OJ? OUR OWN TIMES. 117 
 
 represented and protected the sacred claims of a dec-ply religious people. 
 Dissent, or rather voluntaryism, began to make a progress in Scotland 
 that alarmed thoughtful churchmen. To get over the difficulty the 
 General Assembly, the highest ecclesiastical court in Scotland, and like- 
 wise a sort of Church Parliament, declared that a veto on the nomination 
 of the pastor should be exercised by the congregation, in accordance with 
 a fundamental law of the Church that no pastor should be intruded on 
 any congregation contrary to the will of the people. The Veto Act, as 
 this declaration was called, worked well enough for a short time, and the 
 highest legal authorities declared it not incompatible with the Act of 
 Queen Anne. But it diminished far too seriously the power of the lay 
 patron to be accepted without a struggle. In the celebrated Auchterarder 
 case the patron won a victory over the Church in the courts of law, for 
 having presented a minister whose appointment was vetoed by the congre- 
 gation ; he obtained an order from the civil courts deciding that the pres- 
 bytery must take him on trial, in obedience with the Act of Queen Anne, 
 as he was qualified by life, literature, and doctrine. This question, how- 
 ever, was easily settled by the General Assembly of the Church. They 
 left to the patron's nominee his stipend and his house, and took no further 
 notice of him. They did not recognise him as one of their pastors, but 
 he might have, if he would, the manse and the money which the civil 
 courts had declared to be his. They merely appealed to the Legislature 
 to do something which might make the civil law in harmony with the 
 principles of the Church. A more serious question, however, presently 
 arose. This was the famous Strathbogie case, which brought the authority 
 of the Church and that of the State into irreconcilable conflict. A 
 minister had been nominated in the parish of Marnoch who was so 
 unacceptable to the congregation that 2G1 out of 300 heads of families 
 objected to his appointment. The General Assembly directed the pres- 
 bytery of Strathbogie, in which the parish lay, to reject the minister, 
 Mr. Edwards. The presbytery had long been noted for its leaning towards 
 the claims of the civil power, and it very reluctantly obeyed the command 
 of the highest authority and ruling body of the Church. Another 
 minister was appointed to the parish. Mr. Edwards fought the question 
 out in the civil court and obtained an interdict against the new appoint- 
 ment, and a decision that the presbytery were bound to take himself on 
 trial. Seven members constituting the majority of the presbytery deter- 
 mined, without consulting the General Assembly, to obey the civil power, 
 and they admitted Mr. Edwards on trial. The seven were brought before 
 the bar of the General Assembly, and by an overwhelming majority were 
 condemned to be deposed from their places in the ministry. Their
 
 1 18 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xi. 
 
 parishes were declared vacant. A more complete antagonism between 
 Church and State is not possible to imagine. The Church expelled from 
 its ministry seven men for having obeyed the command of the civil laws. 
 
 It was on the motion of Dr. Chalmers that the seven ministers were 
 deposed. Dr. Chalmers became the leader of the movement which was 
 destined within two years from the time we are now surveying to cause 
 the disruption of the ancient Kirk of Scotland. No man could be better 
 fitted for the task of leadership in such a movement. He was beyond 
 comparison the foremost man in the Scottish Church. He was the greatest 
 pulpit orator in Scotland, or, indeed, in Great Britain. As a scientific writer, 
 both on astronomy and on political economy, he had made a great mark. 
 From having been in his earlier days the minister of an obscure Scottish 
 village congregation, he had suddenly sprung into fame. He was the lion 
 of any city which he happened to visit. If he preached in London, the 
 church was crowded with the leaders of politics, science and fashion, eager 
 to hear him. The effect he produced in England is all the more surprising 
 seeing that he spoke in the broadest Scottish accent conceivable, and, as 
 one admirer admits, mispronounced almost every word. We have already 
 quoted what Mr. Gladstone said about the style of Dr. Newman ; let us 
 cite also what he says about Dr. Chalmers. ' I have heard,' said Mr. 
 Gladstone, ' Dr. Chalmers preach and lecture. Being a man of Scotch 
 blood, I am very much attached to Scotland, and like even the Scotch 
 accent; but not the Scotch accent of Dr. Chalmers. Undoubtedly the 
 accent of Dr. Chalmers in preaching and delivery was a considerable im- 
 pediment to his success ; but, notwithstanding all that, it was overborne 
 by the power of the man in preaching overborne by his power, which 
 melted into harmony with all the adjuncts and incidents of the man as a 
 whole, so much so, that although I would have said that the accent of Dr. 
 Chalmers was distasteful, yet in Dr. Chalmers himself I Avould not have 
 had it altered in the smallest degree.' Chalmers spoke with a massive 
 eloquence in keeping with his powerful frame and his broad brow and hia 
 commanding presence. His speeches were a strenuous blending of argu- 
 ment and emotion. They appealed at once to the strong common sense 
 and to the deep religious convictions of his Scottish audiences. His whole 
 soul was in his work as a leader of religious movements. He cared little 
 or nothing for any popularity or fame that he might have won. Some 
 strong and characteristic words of his own have told TIS what he thought 
 of passing renown. He called it ' a popularity which rifles home of its 
 sweets ; and by elevating a man above his fellows places him in a region 
 of desolation, where he stands a conspicuous mark for the shafts of malice, 
 envv and detraction ; a popularity which, with its head among storms ana
 
 1843. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 119 
 
 its feet on the treacherous quicksands, h;is nothing to lull the agonies ol 
 its tottering existence but the Hosannahs of a drivelling generation.' 
 There is no reason to doubt that these were Chalmers's genuine senti- 
 ments; and scarcely any man of his time had come into so sudden and 
 great an endowment of popularity. The readei of to-day must not look 
 for adequate illustration of the genius and the influence of Chalmers in his 
 published works. These do indeed show him to have been a strong reasoner 
 and a man of original mind. But they do not show the Chalmers of Scottish 
 controversy. That Chalmers must be studied through the traces, lying 
 all around, of his influence upon the mind and the history of the Scottish 
 people. The Free Church of Scotland is his monument. He did not make 
 that Church. It was not the work of one man, or, strictly speaking, of one 
 generation. It grew naturally out of the inevitable struggle between Church 
 and State. But Chalmers did more than any other man to decide the 
 moment and the manner of its coming into existence, and its success ia 
 his best monument. 
 
 For we may anticipate a little, in this instance as in that of the Oxford 
 movement, and mention at once the fact that on May 18, 1843, some five 
 hundred ministers of the Church of Scotland, under the leadership of Dr. 
 Chalmers, seceded from the old Kirk and set about to form the Free Church, 
 The government of Sir Robert Peel had made a weak effort at compromise 
 by legislative enactment, but had declined to introduce any legislation 
 which should free the Kirk of Scotland from the control of the civil coitrts, 
 and there was no course for those who held the views of Dr. Chalmers but 
 to withdraw from the Church which admitted that claim of State control. 
 Opinions may differ as to the necessity, the propriety of the secession as 
 to its effects upon the history and the character of the Scottish people since 
 that time; but there can be no difference of opinion as to the spirit of self- 
 sacrifice in which the step was taken. Five hundred ministers on that 
 memorable day went deliberately forth from their positions of comfort and 
 honour, from home and competence, to meet an uncertain and a perilous 
 future, with perhaps poverty and failure to be the final result of their 
 enterprise, and with misconstruction and misrepresentation to make the 
 bitter bread of poverty more bitter still. In these pages we have nothing 
 to do with the merits of religious controversies ; and it is no part of our 
 concern to consider even the social and political effects produced upon 
 Scotland by this great secession. But we need not withhold our admira- 
 tion from the men who risked and suffered so much in the cause of what 
 they believed to be their Church's true rights ; and we are bound to give 
 this admiration as cordially to the poor and nameless ministers, the men ol 
 the rank and file, about whose doings history so little concerns herself, as
 
 120 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. x. 
 
 to the leaders like Chalmers, who, whether they sought it or not, found 
 fame shining on their path of self-sacrifice. The history of Scotland is 
 illustrated by many great national deeds. No deed it tells of surpasses in 
 dignity and in moral grandeur that secession to cite the words of the 
 protest ' from an Establishment which we loved and prized, through in- 
 terference with conscience, the dishonour done to Christ's crown, and the. 
 rejection of his sole and supreme authority as King in his Church.' 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 
 
 THE earliest days of the Peel Ministry fell upon trouble, not indeed at 
 home, but abroad. At home the prospect still seemed bright. The birth 
 of the Queen's eldest son was an event welcomed by national congratula- 
 tion. There was still great distress in the agricultural districts ; but there 
 was a general confidence that the financial genius of Peel would quickly 
 find some way to make burdens light, and that the condition of things all 
 over the country would begin to mend. It was a region far removed from 
 the knowledge and the thoughts of most Englishmen that supplied the 
 news now beginning to come into England day after day, and to thrill the 
 country with the tale of one of the greatest disasters to English policy and 
 English arms to be found in all the record of our dealings Avith the East. 
 There are many still living who can recall with an impression as keen as 
 though it belonged to yesterday the first accounts that reached this country 
 of the surrender at Cabul, and the gradual extinction of the army that 
 tried to make its retreat through the terrible Pass. 
 
 This grim chapter of history had been for some time in preparation. 
 It may be said to open with the reign itself. News travelled slowly then ; 
 and it was quite in the ordinary course of things that some part of the 
 empire might be torn with convulsion for months before London knew 
 that the even and ordinary condition of things had been disturbed. In 
 this instance, the rejoicings at the accession of the young Queen were still 
 going on when a series of events had begun in Central Asia destined to 
 excite the profoundest emotion in England, and to exercise the most 
 powerful influence upon our foreign policy down to the present hour. On 
 September 20, 1837, Captain Alexander Burnes arrived at Cabul, the 
 capital of the state of Cabul, in the north of Afghanistan, and the ancient 
 capital of the Emperor Baber, whose tomb is on a hill outside the city.
 
 1837- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 121 
 
 Burnes was a famous orientalist and traveller, the Burton or Burnaby of 
 his day; he had conducted an expedition into Central Asia; had published 
 his travels in Bokhara, and had been sent on a mission by the Indian 
 Government, in whose service he was to study the navigation of the Indus. 
 He was, it may be remarked, a member of the family of Kobert Burns, the 
 poet himself having changed the original spelling of the name which all 
 the other members of the family retained. The object of the journey of 
 Captain Burnes to Cabul in 1837 was in the first instance to enter into 
 commercial relations with Dost Mahorned, then ruler of Cabul, and with 
 other chiefs of the western regions. But events soon changed his business 
 from a commercial into a political and diplomatic mission ; and his tragic 
 fate would make his journey memorable to Englishmen for ever, even if 
 other events had not grown out of it Avhich give it a place of more than 
 personal importance in history. 
 
 The great region of Afghanistan, with its historical boundaries as 
 varying and difficult to lix at certain times as those of the old Dukedom of 
 Burgundy, has been called the land of transition between Eastern and 
 Western Asia. All the great ways that lead from Persia to India pass 
 through that region. There is a proverb which declares that no one can 
 be king of Hindostan without first becoming lord of Cabul. The Afghans 
 are the ruling nation, but among them had long been settled Hindoos, 
 Arabs, Armenians, Abyssiriians, and men of other races and religions. 
 The Afghans are Mahometans of the Shunite sect, but they allowed Hin- 
 doos, Christians, and even the Persians, who are of the hated dissenting 
 sect of the Shiites, to live among them, and even to rise to high position 
 and influence The founder of the Afghan empire, Ahmed Shah, died in 
 1773. He had made an empire which stretched from Herat on the west 
 to Sirhind on the east, and from the Oxus and Cashmere on the north to 
 the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Indus on the south. The death of 
 his son, Timur Shah, delivered the kingdom up to the hostile factions, 
 intrigues, and quarrels of his sons; the leaders of a powerful tribe, the 
 Barukzyes, took advantage of the events that arose out of this condition 
 of things to dethrone the descendants of Ahmed Shah. When Captain 
 Burnes visited Afghanistan in 1832, the only part of all their great 
 inheritance which yet remained with the descendants of Ahmed Shah 
 was the principality of Herat. The remainder of Afghanistan was par- 
 celled out between Dost Mahomed and his brothers. Dost Mahomed was 
 a man of extraordinary ability and energy. He would probably have 
 made a name as a soldier and a statesman anywhere. He had led a stormy 
 youth, but had put away with maturity and responsibility the vices and 
 follies of his earlier years. There seems no reason to doubt that althcngn
 
 122 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xi. 
 
 he was a usurper he was a sincere lover of his country, and on the whole 
 a wise and just ruler. When Captain Burnes visited Dost Mahomed, he 
 was received with every mark of friendship and favour. Dost Mahomed 
 professed to be, and no doubt at one time was, a sincere friend of the 
 English Government and people. There was, however, at that time a 
 quarrel going on between the Shah of Persia and the Prince of Herat, the 
 last enthroned representative, as has been already said, of the great family 
 on whose fall Dost Mahomed and his brothers had mounted into power. 
 So far as can now be judged, there does seem to have been serious and 
 genuine ground of complaint on the part of Persia against the ruler of Herat. 
 But it is probable too that the Persian Shah had been seeking for. and in 
 any case, would have found, a pretext for making war ; and the strong 
 impression at the time in England, and among the authorities in India, was 
 that Persia herself Avas but a puppet in the hands of Kussia. A glance at 
 the map will show the meaning of this suspicion and the reasons which at 
 once gave it plausibility, and would have rendered it of grave importance. 
 If Persia were merely the instrument of Russia, and if the troops of the 
 Shah were only the advance guard of the Czar, then undoubtedly the 
 attack on Herat might have been regarded as the first step of a great 
 movement of Kussia towards our Indian dominion. 
 
 There were other reasons, too, to give this suspicion some plausibility. 
 Mysterious agents of Kussia, officers in her service and others, began to 
 show themselves in Central Asia at the time of Captain Burnes's visit to 
 Dost Mahomed. Undoubtedly, Kussia did set herself for some reason to win 
 the friendship arid alliance of Dost Mahomed ; and Captain Burnes was for 
 his part engaged in the same endeavour. All considerations of a merely com- 
 mercial nature had long since been put away, and Burnes was freely and 
 earnestly negotiating with Dost Mahomed for his alliance. Burnes always 
 insisted that Dost Mahomed himself was sincerely anxious to become an ally 
 of England, and that he offered more than once on his own free part to dis- 
 miss the Kussian agents even without seeing them, if Burnes desired him to 
 do so. But for some reason Burnes's superiors did not share his confidence. 
 In Downing Street and in Simla the profoundest distrust of Dost Mahomed 
 prevailed. It was again and again impressed on Burnes that he must 
 regard Dost Mahomed as a treacherous enemy and as a man playing the 
 part of Persia and of Kussia. It is impossible now to estimate fairly all the 
 reasons which may have justified the English and the Indian Governments 
 in this conviction. But we know that nothing in the policy afterwards 
 followed out by the Indian authorities exhibited any of the judgment and 
 wisdom that would warrant us in taking anything for granted on the mere 
 faith of their dictum. The story of four years almost to a day the extent
 
 J837-41. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 123 
 
 of this sad chapter of English history will be a tale of such misfortune, 
 blunder and humiliation as the annals of England do not anywhere else 
 present. Blunders which were indeed worse than crimes, and a principle 
 of action which it is a crime in any rulers to sanction, brought things to 
 such a pass with us that in a few years from the accession of the Queen 
 we had in Afghanistan soldiers who were positively afraid to fight the 
 enemy, and sonic English officials who were not ashamed to treat for the 
 removal of our most formidable foea by purchased assassination. It is a 
 good thing for us all to read in cold blood this chapter of our history. It 
 will teach us how vain is a policy founded on evil and ignoble principles ; 
 how vain is the strength and courage of men when they have not leaders 
 n't to command. It may teach us also not to be too severe in our criticism 
 of other nations. The failure of the French invasion of Mexico under 
 the Second Empire seems like glory when compared with the failure of 
 our attempt to impose a hated sovereign on the Afghan people. 
 
 Captain Burnes then was placed in the painful difficulty of having to 
 carry out a policy of which he entirely disapproved. He believed in Dost 
 Mahomed as a friend, and lie was ordered to regard him as an enemy. It 
 would have been better for the career and for the reputation of Burnes if he 
 had simply declined to have anything to do with a course of action which 
 seemed to him at once unjust and unwise. But Burnes was a young man, 
 full of youth's energy and ambition. He thought he saw a career of dis- 
 tinction opening before him, and he was unwilling to close it abruptly by 
 setting himself in obstinate opposition to his superiors. He was, besides, 
 of a quick mercurial temperament, over which mood followed mood in 
 rapid succession of change. A slight contradiction sometimes threw him 
 into momentary despondency ; a gleam of hope elated him into the assur- 
 ance that all was won. It is probable that after a Avhile he may have per- 
 suaded himself to acquiesce in the judgment of his chiefs. On the other 
 hand, Dost Mahomed was placed in a position of great difficulty and 
 danger. He had to choose. He could not remain absolutely independent 
 of all the disputants. If England would not support him, he must for his 
 own safety find alliances elsewhere : in Russian statecraft, for example. lie 
 told Burnes of this again and again, and Burnes endeavoured without the 
 slightest success to impress his superiors with his own views as to the 
 reasonableness of Dost Mahomed's arguments. Eunjeet Singh, the daring 
 and successful adventurer who had annexed the whole province of Cash- 
 mere to his dominions, was the enemy of Dost Mahomed and the faithful ally 
 of England. Dost Mahomed thought the British Government cc;a3d assist 
 him in coming to terms with Runjeet Singh, and Burnes had assured him 
 that the British Government would do all it could to establish satisfactory
 
 j 24 A HISTOEY OF OUB OWN TIMES. CH. xi 
 
 terms of peace between Afghanistan and the Punjaub, over which. Runjeet 
 Singh ruled. Burnes wrote from Cabul to say that Russia had made sub- 
 stantial offers to Dost Mahomed ; Persia had been lavish in her biddings 
 for his alliance ; Bokhara and other states had not been backward ; 'yet in 
 all that has passed, or is daily transpiring, the chief of Cabul declares that 
 he prefers the sympathy and friendly offices of the British to all these 
 offers, however alluring they may seem, from Persia or from the Emperor ; 
 which places his good sense in a light more than prominent, and in my 
 humble judgment proves that by an earlier attention to these countries we 
 might have escaped the whole of these intrigues and held long since a stable 
 influence in Cabul.' Burnes, however, was unable to impress his superiors 
 with any belief either in Dost Mahomed or in the policy which he himself 
 advocated, and the result was that Lord Auckland, the Governor-General 
 of India, at length resolved to treat Dost Mahomed as an enemy and to 
 drive him from Cabul. Lord Auckland, therefore, entered into a treaty 
 with Runjeet Sing and Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, the exiled representative 
 of what we may call the legitimist rulers of Afghanistan, for the restoration 
 of the latter to the throne of his ancestors, and for the destruction of the 
 power of Dost Mahomed. 
 
 It ought to be a waste of time to enter into any argument in condemna- 
 tion of such a policy in our days. Even if its results had not proved in 
 this particular instance its most striking and exemplary condemnation, it 
 is so grossly and flagrantly opposed to all the principles of our more 
 modern statesmanship that no one among us .ought now to need a warning 
 against it. Dost Mahomed was the accepted, popular and successful ruler 
 of Cabul. No matter what our quarrel with him, we had not the slightest 
 right to make it an excuse for forcing on his people a ruler whom they 
 had proved before, as they were soon to prove again, that they thoroughly 
 detested. Perhaps the nearest parallel to our policy in this instance is to 
 be found in the French invasion of Mexico, and the disastrous attempt to 
 impose a foreign ruler on the Mexican people. Each experiment ended in 
 utter failure, and the miserable death of the unfortunate puppet prince 
 who was put forward as the figure-head of the enterprise. But the French 
 Emperor could at least have pleaded in his defence that Maximilian of 
 Austria had not already been tried and rejected by the Mexican people. 
 Our protege had been tried and rejected. The French Emperor might 
 have pleaded that he had actual and substantial wrongs to avenge. We 
 had only problematical and possible dangers to guard against. In any 
 case, as has been already said, the calamities entailed on French arms and 
 counsels by the Mexican intervention read like a page of brilliant success 
 when compared with the immediate result of our enterprise in Cabul.
 
 18,18. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 125 
 
 Before passing away from this part of the subject, it is necessary to men- 
 tion the fact that among its many unfortunate incidents the campaign led 
 to some peculiarly humiliating debates and some lamentable accusations 
 in the House of Commons. Years after Burnes had been flung into his 
 bloody grave, it was found that the English Government had presented to 
 the House of Commons his despatches in so mutilated and altered a form, 
 that Burnes was made to seem as if he actually approved and recom- 
 mended the policy which he especially warned us to avoid. It is painful 
 to have to record such a fact, but it is indispensable that it should be re- 
 corded. It Avould be vain to attempt to explain how the principles and the 
 honour of English statemanship fell for the hour under the demoralising 
 influence which allowed such things to be thought legitimate. An Oriental 
 atmosphere seemed to have gathered around our official leaders. In 
 Afghanistan they were entering into secret and treacherous treaties ; in 
 England they were garbling despatches. When years after Lord Palmer- 
 ston was called upon to defend the policy which had thus dealt with the 
 despatches of Alexander Burnes, he did not say that the documents were 
 not garbled. He only contended that as the Government had determined 
 not to act on the advice of Burnes, they were in no wise bound to publish 
 those passages of his despatches in which he set forth assumptions which 
 they believed to be unfounded, and advised a policy which they looked 
 upon as mistaken. Such a defence is only to be read with wonder and 
 pain. The Government was not accused of suppressing passages which 
 they believed rightly or wrongly to be worthless. The accusation was, 
 that by suppressing passages and sentences here and there, Burnes was 
 made to appear as if he were actually recommending the policy against 
 which he was at the time most earnestly protesting. Biirnes was himself 
 the first victim of the policy which he strove against, and which all 
 England has since condemned. No severer word is needed to condemn 
 the mutilation of his despatches than to say that he was actually made to 
 stand before the country as responsible for having recommended that very 
 policy. ' It should never be forgotten,' says Sir J. W. Kaye, the historian 
 of the Afghan War, ' by those who would form a correct estimate of the 
 character and career of Alexander Burnes, that both have been misrepre- 
 sented in those collections of State papers which are supposed to furnish 
 the best materials of history, but which are often in reality only one-sided 
 compilations of garbled documents counterfeits, which the ministerial 
 stamp forces into currency, defrauding a present generation, and handing 
 down to posterity a chain of dangerous lies.' 
 
 Meanwhile the Persian attack on Herat had practically failed, owing 
 mainly to the skill and spirit of a young English officer, Eldred Pottinger,
 
 126 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. OH. XT, 
 
 who was assisting the prince in his resistance to the troops of the Persian 
 Shah. Lord Auckland, however, ordered the assemblage of a British 
 force for service across the Indus, and issued a famous manifesto, dated 
 from Simla, October 1, 1838, in which he set forth the motives of hia 
 policy. The Governor- General stated that Dost Mahomed had made a 
 sudden and unprovoked attack upon our ancient ally, Runjeet Singh, and 
 that when the Persian army was besieging Herat, Dost Mahomed was giv- 
 ing Tindisguised support to the designs of Persia. The chiefs of Candahar, 
 the brothers of Dost Mahomed, had also, Lord Auckland declared, given in 
 their adherence to the plans of Persia. Great Britain regarded the advance 
 of Persian arms in Afghanistan as an act of hostility towards herself. The 
 Governor- General had, therefore, resolved to support the claims of the 
 Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, whose dominions had been usurped by the existing 
 rulers of Cabul, and who had found an honourable asylum in British terri- 
 tory ; and 'whose popularity throughout Afghanistan' Lord Auckland 
 wrote in words that must afterwards have read like the keenest and crudest 
 satire upon his policy ' had been proved to his Lordship by the strong 
 and unanimous testimony of the best authorities.' This popular sovereign, 
 this favourite of his people, was at the time living in exile, without the 
 faintest hope of ever again being restored to his dominions. We pulled 
 the poor man out of his obscurity, told him that his people were yearning 
 for him, and that we would set him on his throne once more. We entered 
 for the purpose into the tripartite treaty already mentioned. Mr. (after- 
 wards Sir W. H.) Macnaghten, Secretary to the Government of India, 
 was appointed to be envoy and minister at the court of Shah Soojah ; and 
 Sir Alexander Burnes (who had been recalled from the court of Dost 
 Mahomed and rewarded with a title for giving the advice which his 
 superiors thought absurd) was deputed to act under his direction. It is 
 only right to say that the policy of Lord Auckland had the entire approval 
 of the British Government. It was afterwards stated in Parliament on 
 the part of the Ministry that a despatch recommending to Lord Auckland 
 exactly such a course as he pursued crossed on the way his despatch 
 announcing to the Government at home that he had already under- 
 taken the enterprise. 
 
 We conquered Dost Mahomed and dethroned him. He made a bold 
 and brilliant, sometimes even a splendid resistance. We took Ghuznee by 
 blowing up one of its gates with bags of gunpowder, and thus admitting 
 the rush of a storming party. It was defended by one of the sons of 
 Dost Mahomed, who became our prisoner. We took Jellalabad. which 
 vas defended by Akbar Khan, another of Dost Mahomed's sons, whose 
 aame came afterwards to have a hateful sound in all English ears. As we
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OW^ TIMES. 127 
 
 approached Cabul, Dost Mahomed abandoned his capital and fled with a 
 few horsemen across the Indus. Shah Soojah entered Cabul accompanied 
 by the British officers. It was to have been a triumphal entry. The 
 hearts of those who believed in his cause must have sunk within them 
 when they saw how the Shah was received by the people who, Lord 
 Auckland was assured, were so devoted to him. The city received him in 
 sullen silence. Few of its people condescended even to turn out to see 
 him as he passed. The vast majority stayed away and disdained even to 
 look at him. One would have thought that the least observant eye must 
 have seen that his throne could not last a moment longer than the time 
 during which the strength of Britain was willing to support it. The 
 British army, however, withdrew, leaving only a contingent of some eight 
 thousand men, besides the Shah's own hirelings, to maintain him for the 
 present. Sir W. Macnaghten seems to have really believed that the work 
 was done, and that Shah Soojah was as safe on his throne as Queen 
 Victoria. lie was destined to be very soon and very cruelly undeceived. 
 Dost Mahomed made more than one effort to regain his place. He in- 
 vaded Shah Soojah's dominions, and met the combined forces of the Shah 
 and their English ally in more than one battle. On November 2, 1840, 
 he won the admiration of the English themselves by the brilliant stand he 
 made against them. With his Afghan horse he drove our cavalry before 
 him, and forced them to seek the shelter of the British guns. The native 
 troopers would not stand against him : they fled and left their English 
 officers, who vainly tried to rally them. In this battle of Purwandurrah 
 victory might not unreasonably have been claimed for Dost Mahomed. 
 He won at least his part of the battle. No tongues have praised him 
 louder than those of English historians. But Dost Mahomed had the 
 wisdom of a statesman as well as the genius of a soldier. He knew well 
 that he could not hold out against the strength of England. A savage or 
 fcemi-barbarous chieftain is easily puffed up by a seeming triumph over a 
 great Power, and is led to his destruction by the vain hope that he can hold 
 out against it to the last. Dost Mahomed had no such ignorant and idle 
 notion. Perhaps he knew well enough too that time was wholly on his 
 side ; that he had only to wait and see the sovereignty of Shah Soojah 
 tumble into pieces. The evening after his brilliant exploit in the field 
 Dost Mahomed rode quietly up to the quarters of Sir "W. Macnaghten, met 
 the envoy, who was returning from an evening ride, and to Macnaghten's 
 utter amazement announced himself as Dost Mahomed, tendered to the 
 envoy the sword that had flashed so splendidly across the field of the 
 previous day's fight and surrendered himself a prisoner. His sword was 
 returned ; he was treated with all honour ; and a few days afterwards he 
 was sent to India, where a residence and a revenue were aliened to him.
 
 128 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xt 
 
 But the withdrawal of Dost Mahomed from the scene did nothing to 
 secure the reign of the unfortunate Shah Soojah. The Shah was hated on 
 his own account. He was regarded as a traitor who had sold his country 
 to the foreigners. Insurrections began to be chronic. They were going 
 on in the very midst of Cabul itself. Sir W. Macnaghten was warned of 
 danger, but seemed to take no heed. Some fatal blindness appears to 
 have suddenly fallen on the eyes of our people in Cabul. On November 
 2, 1841, an insurrection broke out. Sir Alexander Burnes lived in the 
 city itself; Sir "W. Macnaghten and the military commander, Major- 
 General Elphinstone, were in cantonments at some little distance. The 
 insurrection might have been put down in the first instance with hardly 
 the need even of Napoleon's famous ' whiff of grapeshot.' But it was 
 allowed to grow up without attempt at control. Sir Alexander Burnes 
 could not be got to believe that it was anything serious even when a fan- 
 atical and furious mob Avere besieging his own house. The fanatics were 
 especially bitter against Burnes, because they believed that he had been 
 guilty of treachery. They accused him of having pretended to be the 
 iriend of Dost Mahomed, deceived him, and brought the English into the 
 country. How entirely innocent of this charge Burnes was we all now 
 know ; but it would be idle to deny that there was much in the external 
 aspect of events to excuse such a suspicion in the mind of an infuriated 
 Afghan. To the last Burnes refused to believe that he was in danger. 
 
 o o 
 
 He had always been a friend to the Afghans, he said, and he could have 
 nothing to fear. It was true. He had always been the sincere friend of 
 the Afghans. It was his misfortune, and the heavy fault of his superiors, 
 that he had been made to appear as an enemy of the Afghans. lie had 
 now to pay a heavy penalty for the errors and the wrong-doing of others. 
 He harangued the raging mob and endeavoured to bring them to reason. 
 He does not seem to have understood up to the very last moment that by 
 reminding them that he was Alexander Burnes, their old friend, he was 
 only giving them a new reason for demanding his life. He was murdered 
 in the tumult. He and his brother and all those with them were hacked 
 to pieces with Afghan knives. He was only in his thirty-seventh year 
 when he was murdered. lie was the first victim of the policy which had 
 csolved to intervene in the affairs of Afghanistan. Fate seldom showed 
 ivith more strange and bitter malice her proverbial irony than when she 
 made him the first victim of the policy adopted in despite of his best 
 fcdvice and his strongest warnings. 
 
 The murder of Burnes was not a climax ; it was only a beginning. 
 The English troops were quartered in cantonments outside the city, and at 
 some little distance from it. These cantonments were in any case of real
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 129 
 
 difficulty practically indefensible. The popular monarch, the darling of 
 his people, whom we had restored to his throne, was in the Bala Hissar, 
 or citadel of Cabul. From the moment when the insurrection broke out 
 he may be regarded as a prisoner or a besieged man there. He was as 
 utterly unable to help our people as they were to help him. The whole 
 country threw itself into insurrection against him and us. The Afghans 
 attacked the cantonments and actually compelled the English to abandon 
 the forts in which all our commissariat was stored. We were thus 
 threatened with famine even if we could resist the enemy in arms. We 
 were strangely unfortunate in our civil and military leaders. Sir W. 
 Macnaghten was a man of high character and good purpose, but he was 
 weak and credulous. The commander, General Elphinstone, was old, 
 infirm, tortured by disease, broken down both in mind and body, inca- 
 pable of forming a purpose of his own, or of holding to one suggested by 
 anybody else. His second in command was a far stronger and abler man ; 
 but unhappily the two could never agree. ' They were both of them,' 
 says Sir J. W. Kaye, ' brave men. In any other situation, though the 
 physical infirmities of the one and the cankered vanity, the dogmatical 
 perverseness of the other, might have in some measure detracted from 
 their efficiency as military commanders, I believe they would have ex- 
 hibited sufficient courage and constancy to rescue an army from utter 
 destruction, and the British name from indelible reproach. But in the 
 Cabul cantonments they were miserably out of place. They seem to have 
 been sent there by superhuman intervention, to work out the utter ruin 
 and prostration of an unholy policy by ordinary human means.' One fact 
 must be mentioned by an English historian ; one which an English his- 
 torian has happily not often to record. It is certain that an officer in our 
 service entered into negotiations for the murder of the insurgent chiefs 
 who were our worst enemies. It is more than probable that he believed 
 in doing so he was acting as Sir W. Macnaghten would have had him do. 
 Sir W. Macnaghten was innocent of any complicity in such a plot, and 
 was incapable of it. But the negotiations were opened and carried on in 
 his name. 
 
 A new figure appeared on the scene, a dark and a fierce apparition. 
 This was Akbar Khan, the favourite son of Dost Mahomed. He was a 
 daring, a clever, an unscrupulous young man. From the moment when 
 he entered Cabul he became the real leader of the insurrection against 
 Shah Soojah and us. Macnaghten, persuaded by the military commander 
 that the position of things was hopeless, consented to enter into negotia- 
 tions with Akbar Khan. Before the arrival of the latter the chiefs of tht 
 insurrection had oiFered us terms which made the ears of our envoy tingle 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 A H1STOKY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. xi. 
 
 Such terms had not often been even suggested to British soldiers before. 
 They were simply unconditional surrender. Macnaghten indignantly 
 rejected them. Everything went wrong with him, however. We were 
 beaten again and again by the Afghans. Our officers never faltered in 
 their duty ; but the melancholy truth has to be told that the men, most oi 
 whom were Asiatics, at last began to lose heart and would not fight the 
 enemy. So the envoy was compelled to enter into terms with Akbar 
 Khan and the other chiefs. Akbar Khan received him at first with con- 
 temptuous insolence as a haughty conqueror receives some ignoble and 
 humiliated adversary. It was agreed that the British troops should quit 
 Afghanistan at once ; that Dost Mahomed and his family should be sent 
 back to Afghanistan ; that on his return the unfortunate Shah Soojah 
 should be allowed to take himself off to India or where he would ; and 
 that some British officers should be left at Cabul as hostages for the ful- 
 filment of the conditions. 
 
 The evacuation did not take place at once, although the fierce winter 
 was setting in, and the snow was falling heavily, ominously. Macnaghten 
 seems to have had still some lingering hopes that something would turn up 
 to relieve him from the shame of quitting the country ; and it must be 
 owned that he does not seem to have had any intention of carrying out 
 the terms of the agreement if by any chance he could escape from them. 
 On both sides there were dairyings and delays. At last Akbar Khan 
 made a new and startling proposition to our envoy. It was that they two 
 should enter into a secret treaty, should unite their arms against the other 
 chiefs, and should keep Shah Soojah on the throne as nominal king, with 
 Akbar Khan as his vizier. Macnaghten caught at the proposals. He had 
 entered into terms of negotiation with the Afghan chiefs together ; he now 
 consented to enter into a secret treaty with one of the chiefs to turn their 
 joint arms against the others. It would be idle and shameful to attempt 
 to defend such a policy. We can only excuse it by considering the terrible 
 circumstances of Macnaghten's position ; the manner in which his nerves 
 and moral fibre had been shaken and shattered by calamities ; and his 
 doubts whether he could place any reliance on the promises of the chiefs, 
 lie had apparently sunk into that condition of mind which Macaulay tells 
 us that Clive adopted so readily in his dealings with Asiatics, and under 
 the influence of which men naturally honourable and high-minded come 
 to believe that it is right to act treacherously with those whom we believe 
 to be treacherous. All this is but excuse, and rather poor excuse. When 
 it has all been said and thought of, we must still be glad to believe that 
 there are not many Englishmen who would, under any circumstances, have 
 consented even to give a hearing to the proposals of Akbar Khan.
 
 J841. A HISTORY OJb* OUK OWN TIMES. 131 
 
 Whatever Maenaghten's error, it was dearly expiated. He went out 
 ?.t noon next day to confer with Akhar Khan on the banks of the neigh- 
 bouring river. Three of his officers were with him. Akbar Khan wag 
 ominously surrounded by friends and retainers. These kept pressing 
 round the unfortunate envoy. Some remonstrance was made by one of 
 the English officers, but Akbar Khan said it was of no consequence, as 
 they were all in the secret. Not many words were spoken ; the expected 
 conference had hardly begun when a signal was given or an order issued 
 by Akbar Khan, and the envoy and the officers were suddenly seized from 
 behind. A scene of wild confusion followed, in which hardly anything is 
 clear and certain but the one most horrible incident. The envoy struggled 
 with Akbar Khan, who had himself seized Macnaghten ; Akbar Khan 
 drew from his belt one of a pair of pistols which Macnaghten had presented 
 to him a short time before and shot him through the body. The fanatics 
 who were crowding round hacked the body to pieces with their knives. 
 Of the three officers one was killed on the spot ; the other two were forced 
 to mount Afghan horses and carried away as prisoners. 
 
 At first this horrible deed of treachery and blood shows like that to 
 which Clearchus and his companions, the chiefs of the famous ten thousand 
 Greeks, fell victims at the hands of Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap. But 
 it seems certain that the treachery of Akbar, base as it was, did not con- 
 template more than the seizure of the envoy and his officers. There were 
 jealousies and disputes among the chiefs of the insurrection. One of them 
 in especial had got his mind filled with the conviction, inspired no doubt 
 by the unfortunate and unparalleled negotiation already mentioned, that 
 the envoy had offered a price for his head. Akbar Khan was accused by 
 him of being a secret friend of the envoy and the English. Akbar Khan's 
 father was a captive in the hands of the English, and it may have been 
 thought that on his account and for personal purposes Akbar was favour- 
 ing the envoy and even intriguing with him. Akbar offered to prove his 
 sincerity by making the envoy a captive and handing him over to the 
 chiefs. This was the treacherous plot which he strove to carry out by 
 entering intc the secret negotiations with the easily-deluded envoy. On 
 the fatal day the latter resisted and struggled ; Akbar Khan heard a ery 
 of alarm that the English soldiers were coming out of cantonments to rescue 
 the envoy ; and, wild with passion, he suddenly drew his pistol and fired. 
 This was the statement made again and again by Akbar Khan himself. It 
 does not seem an improbable explanation for what otherwise looks a murder 
 as stupid and purposeless as it was brutal. The explanation does not much 
 relieve the darkness of Akbar Khan's character. It is given here as his- 
 tory, not as exculpation. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that 
 
 K 2
 
 132 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xi 
 
 Akbar Khan would have shrunk from any treachery or any cruelty which 
 served his purpose. His own explanation of his purpose in this instance 
 shows a degree of treachery which could hardly be surpassed even in the 
 East. But it is well to bear in mind that the suspicions of perfidy under 
 which the English envoy laboured, and which was the main impulse of 
 Akbar Khan's movement, had evidence enough to support it in the eyes 
 of suspicious enemies ; and that poor Macnaghten would not have been 
 murdered had he not consented to meet Akbar Khan and treat with him 
 on a proposition to which an English official should never have listened. 
 
 A terrible agony of suspense followed among the little English force in 
 the cantonments. The military chiefs afterwards stated that they did not 
 know until the following day that any calamity had befallen the envoy. 
 But a keen suspicion ran through the cantonments that some fearful deed 
 had been done. No step was taken to avenge the death of Macnaghten 
 even when it became known that his hacked and mangled body had been 
 exhibited in triumph all through the streets and bazaars of Cabul. A 
 paralysis seemed to have fallen over the councils of our military chiefs. 
 On December 24, 1841, came a letter from one of the officers seized by 
 Akbar Khan, accompanying proposals for a treaty from the Afghan chiefs. 
 It is hard now to understand how any English officers could have consented 
 to enter into terms with the murderers of Macnaghten before his mangled 
 body could well have ceased to bleed. It is strange that it did not occur 
 to most of them that there was an alternative ; that they were not ordered 
 by fate to accept whatever the conquerors chose to offer. We can all see 
 the difficulty of their position. General Elphinstone and his second in 
 command, Brigadier Shelton, were convinced that it would be equally im- 
 possible to stay where they were or to cut their way through the Afghans. 
 But it might have occurred to many that they were nevertheless not bound to 
 treat with the Afghans. They might have remembered the famous answer 
 of the father in Corneille's immortal drama, who is asked what his son 
 could have done but yield in the face of such odds, and exclaims in generous 
 passion that he could have died. One English officer of mark did counsel 
 his superiors in this spirit. This was Major Eldred Pottinger, whose skill 
 ;md courage in the defence of Herat we have already mentioned. Pottinger 
 was for cutting their way through all enemies and difficulties as far as they 
 could, and then occupying the ground with their dead bodies. But his 
 advice was hardly taken into consideration. It was determined to treat 
 with the Afghans ; and treating with the Afghans now meant accepting 
 any terms the Afghans chose to impose on their fallen enemies. In the 
 negotiations that went on some written documents were exchanged. One 
 of these, drawn up by the English negotiators, contains a short sentence
 
 1841. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 133 
 
 which we believe to be absolutely unique in the history of British dealings 
 with armed enemies. It is an appeal to the Afghan conquerors not to be 
 too hard upon the vanquished ; not to break the bruised reed. ' In fricnd- 
 fihip, kindness and consideration are necessary, not overpowering the weak 
 wit}) sufferings ! ' In friendship ! we appealed to the friendship of Mac - 
 naghten's murderers ; to the friendship, in any case, of the man whose 
 father we had dethroned and driven into exile. Not overpowering the 
 weak with sufferings ! The weak were the English ! One might fancy 
 he was reading the plaintive and piteous appeal of some forlorn and feeble 
 tribe of helpless half-breeds for the mercy of arrogant and mastering 
 rulers. 'Suffolk's imperious tongue is stern and rough,' says one in 
 Shakespeare's pages when he is bidden to ask for consideration at the 
 hands of captors whom he is no longer able to resist. The tongue with 
 which the English force at Cabul addressed the Afghans was not imperious 
 or stern or rough. It was bated, mild and plaintive. Only the other day, 
 it would seem, these men had blown up the gates of Ghuznee and rushed 
 through the dense smoke and the falling ruins to attack the enemy hand 
 to hand. Only the other day our envoy had received in surrender the 
 bright sword of Dost Mahomed. Now the same men who had seen these 
 things could only plead for a little gentleness of consideration, and had no 
 thought of resistance, and did not any longer seem to know how to die. 
 
 We accepted the terms of treaty offered to us. Nothing else could be 
 done by men who were not prepared to adopt the advice of the heroic 
 father in Corneille. The English were at once to take themselves off out 
 of Afghanistan, giving up all their guns except six, which they were 
 allowed to retain for their necessary defence in their mournful journey 
 home ; they were to leave behind all the treasure, and to guarantee the 
 payment of something additional for the safe conduct of the poor little 
 army to Peshawur or to Jellalabad ; and they were to hand over six 
 officers as hostages for the due fulfilment of the conditions. It is of course 
 understood that the conditions included the immediate release of Dost 
 Mahomed and his family and their return to Afghanistan. When these 
 should return, the six hostages were to be released. Only one concession 
 had been obtained from the conquerors. It was at first demanded that 
 some of the married ladies should be left as hostages ; but on the urgent 
 representations of the English officers this condition was waived at least 
 for the moment. When the treaty was signed, the officers who had been 
 seized when Macnaghten was murdered were released. 
 
 It is worth mentioning that these officers were not badly treated by 
 Akbar Khan while they were in his power. On the contrary, he had to 
 make strenuous efforts, and did make them in good faith, to save them
 
 1 34 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xi 
 
 from being murdered by bands of his fanatical followers. One of the 
 officers has himself described the almost desperate efforts which Akbai 
 Khan hud to make to save him from the fury of the mob, who thronged, 
 thirsting for the blood of the Englishman, up to the very stirrup of their 
 young chief. ' Akbar Khan,' says this officer, ' at length drew his sword 
 and laid about him right manfully ' in defence of his prisoner. When, 
 however, he had got the latter into a place of safety, the impetuous young 
 Afghan chief could not restrain a sneer at his captive and the cause his 
 captive represented. Turning to the English officer, he said more than 
 once, ' in a tone of triumphant derision,' some words such as these : ' So 
 you are the man who came here to seize my country ? ' It mu-st be owned 
 that the condition of things gave bitter meaning to the taunt, if they did 
 not actually excuse it. At a later period of this melancholy story it is 
 told by Lady Sale that crowds of the fanatical Ghilzyes were endeavouring 
 to persuade Akbar Khan to slaughter all the English, and that when he 
 tried to pacify them they said that when Burnes came into the country 
 they entreated Akbar Khan's father to have Burnes killed, or he would go 
 back to Hindostan, and on some future day return and bring an army 
 with him, ' to take our country from us' ; and all the calamities had come 
 upon them because Dost Mahomed Avould not take their advice. Akbar 
 Khan either was or pretended to be moderate. He might indeed safely 
 put on an air of magnanimity. His enemies were doomed. It needed no 
 command from him to decree their destruction. 
 
 The withdrawal from Cabul began. It was the heart ot a cruel winter. 
 The English had to make their way through the awful pass of Koord Cabul. 
 This stupendous gorge runs for some five miles between mountain ranges 
 so narrow, lofty and grim, that in the winter season the rays of the sun 
 can. hardly pierce its darkness even at the noontide. Down the centre 
 dashed a precipitous mountain torrent, so fiercely that the stern frost of 
 that terrible time could not stay its course. The snow lay in masses on 
 the ground ; the rocks and stones that raised their heads above the snow 
 in the way of the unfortunate travellers were slippery with frost. Soon 
 the white snow began to be stained and splashed with blood. Fearful as 
 this Koord Cabul Pass was, it was only a degree worse than the road which 
 for two whole days the English had to traverse to reach it. The army 
 which set out trom Cabul numbered more than four thousand fighting 
 men, of whom Europeans, it should be said, formed but a small proportion ; 
 and some twelve thousand camp followers of all kinds. There were also 
 many women and children. Lady Macnaghten, widow of the murdered 
 envoy ; Lady Sale, whose gallant husband was holding Jellalabad at the 
 end of the Khyber Pass towards the Indian frontier; Mrs. Sturt, her
 
 1842. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 135 
 
 daughter, soon to be widowed by the death of her young husband ; Mrs. 
 Trevor and her seven children, and many other pitiable fugitives. The 
 winter journey would have been cruel and dangerous enough in time of 
 peace ; but this journey had to be accomplished in the midst of something 
 far worse than common war. At every step of the road, every opening 
 of the rocks, the unhappy crowd of confused and heterogeneous fugitives 
 were beset by bands of ravage fanatics, who with their long guns and long 
 knives were murdering all they could reach. It was all the way a confused 
 constant battle against a guerrilla enemy of the most furious and merciless 
 temper, who were perfectly familiar with the ground, and could rush forward 
 and retire exactly as suited their tactics. The English soldiers, weary, 
 weak, and crippled by frost, could make but a poor fight against the savage 
 Afghans. ' It was no longer,' says Sir J. W. Kaye, ' a retreating army ; 
 it was a rabble in chaotic flight.' Men, women, and children, horses, ponies, 
 camels, the wounded, the dying, the dead, all crowded together in almost 
 inextricable confusion among the snow and amid the relentless enemies. 
 ' The massacre ' to quote again from Sir J. W. Kaye, ' was fearful in this 
 Koord Cabul Pass. Three thousand men are said to have fallen under 
 the fire of the enemy, or to have dropped down paralysed and exhausted 
 to be slaughtered by the Afghan knives. And amidst these fearful scenes 
 of carnage, through a shower of matchlock balls, rode English ladies on 
 horseback or in camel-panniers, sometimes vainly endeavouring to keep 
 their children beneath their eyes, and losing them in the confusion and 
 bewilderment of the desolating march.' 
 
 Was it for this, then, that our troops had been induced to capitulate ? 
 Was this the safe-conduct which the Afghan chiefs had promised in return 
 for their accepting the ignominious conditions imposed on them ? Some 
 of the chiefs did exert themselves to their utmost to protect the unfortu- 
 nate English. It is not certain what the real wish of Akhar Khan may 
 have been. He protested that he had no power to restrain the hordes of 
 fanatical Ghilzyes, whose own immediate chiefs had not authority enough 
 to keep them from murdering the English whenever they got a chance. 
 The force of some few hundred horsemen whom Akbar Khan had with 
 him were utterly incapable, he declared, of maintaining order among such 
 a lot of infuriated and lawless savages. Akbar Khan constantly appeared on 
 the scene during this journey of terror. At every opening or break of the 
 long straggling flight he and his little band of followers showed themselves 
 on the horizon : trying still to protect the English from utter ruin, as he 
 declared ; come to gloat over their misery and to see that it was surely 
 accomplished, some of the unhappy English were ready to believe. Yet 
 his presence was something that seemed to give a hope of orotection.
 
 136 .A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xi 
 
 Akbar Khan at length startled the English by a proposal that the women 
 and children who were with the army should be handed over to his 
 custody to be conveyed by him in safety to Peshawur. There was nothing 
 better to be done. The only modification of his request, or command, 
 that could be obtained was that the husbands of the married ladies should 
 accompany their wives. With this agreement the women and children 
 were handed over to the care of this dreaded enemy, and Lady Macnaghten 
 had to undergo the agony of a personal interview with the man whose 
 own hand had killed her husband. Few scenes in poetry or romance can 
 surely be more thrilling with emotion than such a meeting as this must 
 have been. Akbar Khan was kindly in his language, and declared to the 
 unhappy widow that he would give his right arm to undo, if it were 
 possible, the deed that he had done. 
 
 The women and children and the married men whose wives were 
 among this party were taken from the unfortunate army and placed under 
 the care of Akbar Khan. As events turned out, this proved a fortunate 
 thing for them. But in any case it was the best thing that could be done. 
 Not one of these women and children could have lived through the horrors 
 of the journey which lay before the remnant of what had once been a 
 British force. The march was resumed ; new horrors set in ; new heaps 
 of corpses stained the snow ; and then Akbar Khan presented himself 
 with a fresh proposition. In the treaty made at Cabul between the Eng- 
 lish authorities and the Afghan chiefs there was an article which stipulated 
 that ' the English force at Jellalabad shall march for Peshawur before the 
 Cabul army arrives, and shall not delay on the road.' Akbar Khan was 
 especially anxious to get rid of the little army at Jellalabad at the near 
 end of the Khyber Pass. He desired above all things that it should be 
 on the march home to India ; either that it might be out of his way, or 
 that he might have a chance of destroying it on its way. It was in great 
 measure as a security for its moving that he desired to have the women 
 and children under his care. It is not likely that he meant any harm to 
 the women and children ; it must be remembered that his father and many 
 of the women of his family were under the control of the British Govern- 
 ment as prisoners in Hindostan. But he fancied that if he had the English 
 women in his hands the army at Jellalabad could not refuse to obey the 
 condition set down in the article of the treaty. Now that he had the 
 women in his power, however, he demanded other guarantees, with openly 
 acknowledged purpose of keeping these latter until Jellalabad should have 
 been evacuated. He demanded that General Elphinstone, the commander, 
 with his second in command, and also one other officer, should hand 
 themselves over to him as hostages. He promised if this were done to
 
 1842. A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 137 
 
 exert himself more than before to restrain the fanatical tribes, and also to 
 provide the army in the Koord Cabul Pass with provisions. There waa 
 nothing for it but to submit ; and the English general himself became, 
 with the women and children, a captive in the hands of the inexorable 
 enemy. 
 
 Then the march of the army, without a general, went on again. 
 Soon it became the story of a general without an army ; before very long 
 there was neither general nor army. It is idle to lengthen a tale of mere 
 horrors. The straggling remnant of an army entered the Jugdulluk Pass 
 a dark, steep, narrow, ascending path between crags. The miserable 
 toilers found that the fanatical, implacable tribes had barricaded the pass. 
 All was over. The army of Cabul was finally extinguished in that barri- 
 caded pass. It was a trap ; the British were taken in it. A few mere 
 fugitives escaped from the scene of actual slaughter, and were on the 
 road to Jellalabad, where Sale and his little army were holding their own. 
 When they were within sixteen miles of Jellalabad the number wae 
 reduced to six. Of these six, five were killed by straggling marauders on 
 the way. One man alone reached Jellalabad to tell the tale. Literally 
 one man, Dr. Brydon, came to Jellalabad out of a moving host which had 
 numbered in all some sixteen thousand when it set out on its march. 
 The curious eye will search through history or fiction in vain for any 
 picture more thrilling with the suggestions of an awful catastrophe than 
 that of this solitary survivor, faint and reeling on his jaded horse, as he 
 appeared under the walls of Jellalabad, to bear the tidings of our Ther- 
 mopylae of pain and shame. 
 
 This is the crisis of the story. With this at least the worst of the 
 pain and shame were destined to end. The rest is all, so far as we are 
 concerned, reaction and recovery. Our successes are common enough ; 
 we may tell their tale briefly in this instance. The garrison at Jellalabad 
 had received before Dr. Brydon's arrival an intimation that they were to 
 go out and march towards India in accordance with the terms of the treaty 
 extorted from Elphinstone at Cabul. They very properly declined to be 
 bound by a treaty which, as General Sale rightly conjectured, had been 
 ' forced from our envoy and military commander with the knives at their 
 throats.' General Sale's determination was clear and simple. ' I propose 
 to hold this place on the part of Government until I receive its order to 
 the contrary.' This resolve of Sale's was really the turning point of the 
 history. Sale held Jellalabad ; Nott was at Candahar. Akbar Khar- 
 besieged Jellalabad. Nature seemed to have declared herself emphati- 
 cally on his side, for a siiccession of earthquake shocks shattered the walls 
 of the place, and produced more terrible destruction than the most formid-
 
 138 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. jt. 
 
 able guns of modern warfare could have done. But the garrison held 
 out fearlessly ; they restored the parapets, re-established every battery, 
 re-trenched the whole of the gates, and built up all the breaches. They 
 resisted every attempt of Akbar Khan to advance upon their works, and 
 at length when it became certain that General Pollock was forcing the 
 Khyber Pass to come to their relief, they determined to attack Akbar 
 Khan's army ; they issued boldly out of their forts, forced a battle on the 
 Afghan chief, and completely defeated him. Before Pollock, having 
 gallantly fought his way through the Khyber Pass, had reached Jellalabad, 
 the beleaguering army had been entirely defeated and dispersed. General 
 Nott at Candahar was ready now to co-operate with General Sale and 
 General Pollock for any movement on Cabul which the authorities might 
 advise or sanction. Meanwhile the unfortunate Shah Soojah, whom we 
 had restored with so much pomp of announcement to the throne of his 
 ancestors, was dead. He was assassinated in Cabul, soon after the departure 
 of the British, by the orders of some of the chiefs who detested him ; and 
 his body, stripped of its royal robes and its many jewels, was flung into 
 a ditch. Historians quarrel a good deal over the question of his sincerity 
 and fidelity in his dealings with us. It is not likely that an Oriental of 
 his temperament and his weakness could have been capable of any genuine 
 and unmixed loyalty to the English strangers. It seems to us probable 
 enough that he may at important moments have wavered and even faltered, 
 glad to take advantage of any movement that might safely rid him of us, 
 and yet on the whole preferring our friendship and our protection to the 
 tender mercies which he was doomed to experience when our troops had 
 left him. But if we ask conr^rning his gratitude to us, it may be well 
 also to ask what there was in our conduct towards him which called for 
 any enthusiastic display of gratitude. We did not help him out of any 
 love for him, or any concern for the justice of his cause. It served us to 
 have a puppet, and we took him when it suited us. We also abandoned 
 him when it suited us. As Lady Teazle proposes to do with honour in 
 her conference with Joseph Surface, so we ought to do with gratitude in 
 discussing the merits of Shah Soojah leave it out of the question. What 
 Shah Soojah owed to ITS was a few weeks of idle pomp and absurd 
 dreams, a bitter awakening and a shameful death. 
 
 During this time a new Governor-General had arrived in India. Lord 
 Auckland's time had run out, and during its latter months he had become 
 nerveless and despondent because of the utter failure of the policy which 
 in an evil hour for himself and his country he had been induced to under- 
 take. It does not seem that it ever was at heart a policy of his own, and 
 he knew that the East India Company were altogether opposed to it. The
 
 1842. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 139 
 
 Company were well aware of the vast expense which our enterprises in 
 Afghanistan must impose on the revenues of India, and they looked forward 
 eagerly to the earliest opportunity of bringing it to a close. Lord Auckland 
 had been persuaded into adopting it against his better judgment, and against 
 even the whisperings of his conscience; and now he too longed to be done 
 with it; but he wished to leave Afghanistan as a magnanimous conqueror. 
 He had in his own person discounted the honours of victory. lie had 
 received an earldom for the services he was presumed to have rendered 
 to his sovereign and his country. He had therefore in full sight that 
 mournful juxtaposition of incongruous objects which a great English 
 writer has described so touchingly and tersely the trophies of victory 
 and the battle lost. lie was an honourable, kindly gentleman, and the 
 news of all the successive calamities fell upon him with a crushing, an 
 overwhelming weight. In plain language, the Governor-General lost his 
 head. He seemed to have no other idea than that of getting all our troops 
 as quickly as might be out of Afghanistan and shaking the dust of the 
 place off our feet for ever. It may be doubted whether, if we had pursued 
 such a policy as this, we might not as well have left India itself once for 
 all. If we had allowed it to seem clear to the Indian populations and 
 princes that we could be driven out of Afghanistan with humiliation arid 
 disaster, and that we were unable or afraid to strike one blow to redeem 
 our military credit, we should before long have seen in Hindostan many 
 an attempt to enact there the scenes of Cabul and Candahar. Unless a 
 moralist is prepared to say that a nation which has committed one error 
 of policy is bound in conscience to take all the worse and most protracted 
 consequences of that error, and never make any attempt to protect itself 
 against them, even a moralist of the most scrupulous character can hardly 
 deny that we were bound, for the sake of our interests in Europe as well 
 as in India, to prove that our strength had not been broken nor our counsels 
 paralysed by the disasters in Afghanistan. Yet Lord Auckland does not 
 appear to have thought anything of the kind either needful or within rfte 
 compass of our national strength. He was, in fact, a broken man. 
 
 His successor came out with the brightest hopes of India and the 
 world, founded on his energy and strength of mind. The successor was 
 Lord Ellenborough, the son of that Edward Law, afterwards Lord Ellen- 
 borough, Ckief Justice of the King's Bench, who had been leading counsel 
 for Warren Hastings when the latter was impeached before the House of 
 Lords. The second Ellenborough was at the time of his appointment 
 rilling the office of President of the Board of Control, an office he had 
 held before. He was therefore well acquainted with the affairs of India, 
 fie had ci'ine into office under Sir Robert Peel on the resignation of the
 
 1 40 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xi. 
 
 Melbourne Ministry. He was looked upon as a man of great ability and 
 energy. It was known that his personal predilections were for the career 
 of a soldier. He was fond of telling his hearers then and since that the 
 life of a camp was that which he should have loved to lead. He was a 
 man of great and, in certain lights, apparently splendid abilities. There 
 was a certain Orientalism about his language, his aspirations and his policy. 
 He loved gorgeousness and dramatic ill-natured persons said theatric 
 effects. Lii'e arranged itself in his eyes as a superb and showy pageant of 
 which it would have been his ambition to form the central figure. His 
 eloquence was often of a lofty and noble order. Men who are still hardly 
 of middle age can remember Lord Ellenborough on great occasions in the 
 House of Lords, and can recollect their having been deeply impressed by 
 him, even though they had but lately heard such speakers as Gladstone or 
 Bright in the other House. It was not easy, indeed, sometimes to avoid 
 the conviction that in listening to Lord Ellenborough one was listening to 
 a really great orator of a somewhat antique and stately type, who attuned 
 his speech to the pitch of an age of loftier and less prosaic aims than ours. 
 When he had a great question to deal with, and when his instincts, if not 
 his reasoning power, had put him on the right, or at least the effective, 
 side of it, he could speak in a tone of poetic and elevated eloquence to 
 which it was impossible to listen without emotion. But if Lord Ellen- 
 borough was in some respects a man of genius, he was also a man whose 
 love of mere effects often made him seem like a quack. There are certain 
 characters in which a little of unconscious quackery is associated with some 
 of the elements of true genius. Lord Ellenborough was one of these. Far 
 greater men than he must be associated in the same category. The elder 
 Pitt, the first Napoleon, Mirabeau, Bolingbroke, and many others, were 
 men in whom undoubtedly some of the charlatan was mixed up with some 
 of the very highest qualities of genius. In Lord Ellenborough this blending 
 was strongly, and sometimes even startlingly, apparent. To this hour 
 there are men who knew him well in public and private on whom his 
 weaknesses made so disproportionate an impression that they can see in 
 him little more than a mere charlatan. This is entirely unjust. He was 
 a man of great abilities and earnestness, who had in him a strange dash of 
 the play-actor, who at the most serious moment of emergency always 
 thought of how to display himself effectively, and who would have met 
 the peril of an empire as poor Narcissa met death, with an overmastering 
 desire to show to the best personal advantage. 
 
 Lord Ellenborough's appointment was hailed by all parties in India as 
 the most auspicious that could be made. Here, people said, is surely the 
 great stage for a great actor and now the great actor is coming. There
 
 1842. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 141 
 
 would be something fascinating to a temper like his in the thought ol 
 redeeming the military honour of his country and standing out in history 
 us the avenger of the shames of Cabul. But those who thought in this 
 way found themselves suddenly disappointed. Lord Ellenborough uttered 
 and wrote a few showy sentences about revenging our losses and ' re-esta- 
 blishing in all its original brilliancy our military character.' But when he 
 had done this he seemed to have relieved his mind and to have done 
 enough. With him there was a constant tendency to substitute grandiose 
 phrases for deeds ; or perhaps to think that the phrase was the thing of 
 real moment. He said these fine words, and then at once he announced 
 that the only object of the Government was to get the troops out of 
 Afghanistan as quickly as might be, and almost on any terms. The whole 
 of Lord Ellenborough's conduct during this crisis is inexplicable excnpt on 
 the assumption that he really did not know at certain times how to dis- 
 tinguish between phrases and actions. A general outcry was raised in 
 India and among the troops in Afghanistan against the extraordinary 
 policy which Lord Ellenborough propounded. Englishmen, in fact, refused 
 to believe in it ; took it as something that must be put aside. English 
 soldiers could not believe that they were to be recalled after defeat; they 
 persisted in the conviction that, let the Governor-General say what he 
 might, his intention must be that the army should retrieve its fame ana 
 retire only after complete victory. The Governor- General himself after 
 a while quietly acted on this interpretation of his meaning. He allowed 
 the military commanders in Afghanistan to pull their resources together 
 and prepare for inflicting signal chastisement on the enemy. They were 
 not long in doing this. They encountered the enemy wherever he showed 
 himself and defeated him. They recaptured town after town, until at 
 length, on September 15, 1842, General Pollock's force entered Cabul. 
 A few days after, as a lasting mark of retribution for the crimes which 
 had been committed there, the British commander ordered the destruction 
 of the great bazaar of Cabul, where the mangled remains of the unfortunate 
 envoy Macnaghten had been exhibited in brutal triumph and joy to the 
 Afghan population. 
 
 It is not necessary to enter into detailed descriptions of the successful 
 progress of our arms. The war may be regarded as over. It is, however, 
 necessary to say something of the fate of the captives, or hostages, who 
 were hurried away that terrible January night at the command of Akbar 
 Khan. One thing has first to be told which some may now receive with 
 incredulity, but which is, nevertheless, true there was a British general 
 who was disposed to leave them to their fate and take no trouble about 
 them, and who declared himself under the conviction, from the tenor of
 
 142 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xi 
 
 all Lord Ellenborough's despatches, that the recovery of the prisoners was 
 'a matter of indifference to the Government.' There seems to have been 
 some unhappy spell working against us in all this chapter of our history, 
 by virtue of which even its most brilliant pages were destined to have 
 something ignoble or ludicrous written on them. Better counsels, how- 
 ever, prevailed. General Pollock insisted on an effort being made to 
 recover the prisoners before the troops began to return to India, and he 
 appointed to this noble duty the husband of one of the hostage ladies 
 Sir Kobert Sale. The prisoners were recovered with greater ease than 
 was expected so many of them as were yet alive. Poor General Elphin- 
 stone had long before succiimbed to disease and hardship. The ladies had 
 gone through strange privations. Thirty-six years ago the tale of the 
 captivity of Lady Sale and her companions was in every mouth all over 
 England ; nor did any civilised land fail to take an interest in the strange 
 and pathetic story. They were hurried from fort to fort as the designs 
 and the fortunes of Akbar Khan dictated his disposal of them. They 
 suffered almost every fierce alternation of cold and heat. They had to 
 live on the coarsest fare ; they were lodged in a manner which would have 
 made the most wretched prison accommodation of a civilised country seem 
 luxurious by comparison; they were in constant uncertainty and fear, not 
 knowing what might befall. Yet they seem to have held up their courage 
 and spirits wonderfully well, and to have kept the hearts of the children 
 alive with mirth and sport at moments of the utmost peril. Gradually it 
 became more and more suspected that the fortunes of Akbar Khan were 
 falling. At last it was beyond doubt that he had been completely defeated. 
 Then they were hurried away again, they knew not whither, through ever- 
 ascending mountain passes, under a scorching sun. They were being 
 carried off to the wild rugged regions of the Indian Caucasus. They were 
 bestowed in a miserable fort at Bameean. They were now under the 
 charge of one of Akbar Khan's soldiers of fortune. This man had begun 
 to suspect that things were wellnigh hopeless with Akbar Khan. He was 
 induced by gradual and very cautious approaches to enter into an agree- 
 ment with the prisoners for their release. The English officers signed an 
 agreement with him to secure him a large reward and a pension for life, if 
 he enabled them to escape. lie accordingly declared that he renounced his 
 allegiance to Akbar Khan; all the more readily, seeing that news came in 
 of the chiefs total defeat and flight, no one knew whither. The prisoners 
 and their escort, lately their gaoler and guards, set forth on their way to 
 General Pollock's camp. On their way they met the English parties sent out 
 to seek for them. Sir Kobcrt Sale found his wife again. ' Our joy,' says 
 one of the rescued prisoners, ' was too great, too overwhelming, for tongue
 
 1842. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 143 
 
 to utter.' Description, indeed, could do nothing for the effect of such a 
 meeting but to spoil it. 
 
 There is a very different ending to the episode of the English captives 
 in Bokhara. Colonel Stoddart, who had been sent to the Persian camp in 
 the beginning of all these events to insist that Persia must desist from the 
 siege of Herat, was sent subsequently on a mission to the Ameer of Bok- 
 hara. The Ameer received him favourably at first, but afterwards became 
 suspicious of English designs of conquest, and treated Stoddart with marked 
 indignity. The Ameer appears to have been the very model of a melo- 
 dramatic Eastern tyrant. He was cruel and capricious as another Caligula, 
 and perhaps, in truth, quite as mad. He threw Stoddart into prison. 
 Captain Conolly was appointed two years after to proceed to Bokhara and 
 other countries of the same region. He undertook to endeavour to effect 
 the liberation of Stoddart, but could only succeed in sharing his sufferings, 
 and, at last, his fate. The Ameer had written a letter to the Queen of 
 England, and the answer was written by the Foreign Secretary, referring 
 the Ameer to the Governor-General of India. The savage tyrant re- 
 doubled the ill-treatment of his captives. He accused them of being 
 spies and of giving help to his enemies. The Indian Government were of 
 opinion that the envoys had in some manner exceeded their instructions, 
 and that Conolly in particular had contributed by indiscretion to his own 
 fate. Nothing therefore was done to obtain their release beyond diplomatic 
 efforts, and appeals to the magnanimity of the Ameer, which had not any 
 particular effect. Dr. Wolff, the celebrated traveller and missionary, after- 
 wards undertook an expedition of his own in the hope of saving the un- 
 fortunate captives ; but he only reached Bokhara in time to hear that they 
 had been put to death. The moment and the actual manner of their death 
 cannot be known to positive certainty, but there is little doubt that they 
 were executed on the same day by the orders of the Ameer. The journals 
 of Conolly have been preserved up to an advanced period of his captivity, 
 and they relieve so far the melancholy of the fate that fell on the unfor- 
 tunate officers by showing that the horrors of their hopeless imprisonment 
 were so great that their dearest friends must have been glad to know of 
 their release even by the knife of the executioner. It is perhaps not the 
 least bitter part of the story, that in the belief of many, including the un- 
 fortunate officers themselves, the course pursued by the English authori- 
 ties in India had done more to hand them over to the treacherous cruelty 
 of their captor than to release them from his power. In truth, the authori- 
 ties of India had had enough of intervention. It woxild have needed a great 
 exigency indeed to stir them into energy of action soon again in Central 
 Asia.
 
 144 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xi. 
 
 This thrilling chapter of English history closes with something like a 
 piece of harlequinade. The curtain fell amid general laughter. Only the 
 genius of Lord Ellenborough could have turned the mood of India and of 
 England to mirth on such a subject. Lord Ellenborough was equal to this 
 extraordinary feat. The never-to-be-forgotten proclamation about the 
 restoration to India of the gates of the temple of Somnauth, redeemed at 
 Lord Ellenborough's orders when Ghuznee was retaken by the English, 
 was first received with incredulity as a practical joke ; then with one 
 universal burst of laughter; then with indignation; and then, again, when 
 the natural anger had died away, with laughter again. ' My brothers and 
 my friends,' wrote Lord Ellenborough ' to all the princes, chiefs, and 
 people of India,' ' Our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of 
 Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Sultan 
 Mahrnoud looks upon the ruins of, Ghuznee. The insult of eight hundred 
 years is at last avenged. The gates of the temple of Somnauth, so long the 
 memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your 
 national glory ; the proof of your superiority in arms over the nations 
 beyond the Indus.' 
 
 No words of pompous man could possibly have put together greater 
 absurdities. The brothers and friends were Mahometans and Hindoos, 
 who were about as likely to agree as to the effect of these symbols of 
 triumph as a Fenian and an Orangeman would be to fraternize in a toast 
 to the glorious, pious and immortal memory. To the Mahometans the 
 triumph of Lord Ellenborough was simply an insult. To the Hindoos the 
 offer was ridiculous ; for the temple of Somnautli itself was in ruins, and 
 the ground it covered was trodden by Mahometans. To finish the ab- 
 surdity, the gates proved not to be genuine relics at all. 
 
 On October 1, 1842, exactly four years since Lord Auckland's pro- 
 clamation announcing and justifiying the intervention to restore Shah 
 Soojah, Lord Ellenborough issued another proclamation announcing the 
 complete failure and the revocation of the policy of his predecessor. Lord 
 Ellenborough declared that ' to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people 
 would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the 
 British Government ; ' that therefore they would recognise any govern- 
 ment approved by the Afghans themselves; that the British arms would 
 be withdrawn from Afghanistan, and that the Government of India would 
 remain ' content with the limits nature appears to have assigned to it* 
 empire.' Dost Mahomed was released from his captivity, and before long 
 was ruler of Cabul once again. Thus ended the story of our expedition to 
 reorganise the internal condition of Afghanistan. 'After four years of un- 
 paralleled trial and disaster, everything was restored to the condition in
 
 184JJ. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 145 
 
 which we found it; except that there were so many brave Englishmen sleep- 
 ing in bloody graves. The Duke of Wellington ascribed the causes of our 
 failure to making war with a peace establishment ; making war without 
 a safe base of operations ; carrying the native army out of India into a 
 strange and cold climate ; invading a poor country which was unequal to 
 the supply of our wants ; giving undue power to political agents ; want 
 of forethought and undue confidence in the Afghans on the part of Sir 
 W. Macnaghten ; placing our magazines, even our treasure, in indefensible 
 places; great military neglect and mismanagement after the outbreak. 
 Doubtless these were in a military sense the reasons for the failure of 
 an enterprise which cost the revenues of India an enormous amount of 
 treasure. But the causes of failure were deeper than any military errors 
 could explain. It is doubtful whether the genius of a Napoleon and the 
 forethought of a Wellington could have won any permanent success for 
 an enterprise founded on so false and fatal a policy. Nothing in the ability 
 or devotion of those entrusted with the task of carrying it out could have 
 made it deserve success. Our first error of principle was to go completely 
 out of our way for the purpose of meeting mere speculative dangers ; our 
 next and far greater error was made when we attempted, in the words of 
 Lord Ellenboroi;gh's proclamation, to force a sovereign upon a reluctant 
 people. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE REPEAL YEAR 
 
 ' THE year 1843,' said O'Connell,' ' is and shall be the great Repeal year.' 
 In the year 1843, at all events, O'Connell and his Repeal agitation are 
 entitled to the foremost place. The character of the man himself weU 
 deserves some calm consideration. We are now, perhaps, in a condition 
 to do it justice. We are far removed in sentiment and political association, 
 if not exactly in years, from the time when O'Connell was the idol of one 
 party, and the object of all the bitterest scorn and hatred of the other. No 
 man of his time was so madly worshipped and so fiercely denounced. No 
 man in our time was ever the object of so much abuse in the newspapers. 
 The fiercest and coarsest attacks that we can remember to have been made 
 in English journals on Cobden and Bright during the heat of the Anti- 
 Corn Law agitation seem placid, gentle, and almost complimentary when 
 compared with the criticisms daily applied to O'Connell. The only vitu- 
 peration which could equal in vehemence and scurrility that poured out 
 upon O'Connell was that which O'Connell himself poured out upon his 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XH. 
 
 assailants. His hand was against every man, if every man's hand was 
 against him. He asked for no quarter, and he gave none. 
 
 We have outlived, not the times merely, but the whole spirit of the 
 times so far as political controversy is concerned. We are now able to 
 recognise the fact that a public man may hold opinions which are distaste- 
 ful to the majority, and yet be perfectly sincere and worthy of respect. 
 We are well aware that a man may differ from us, even on vital questions, 
 and yet be neither fool nor knave. But this view of things was not gene- 
 rally taken in the days of O'Connell's great agitation. He and his enemies 
 alike acted in their controversies on the principle that a political opponent 
 is necessarily a blockhead or a scoundrel. It is strange and somewhat 
 melancholy to read the strictures of so enlightened a woman as Miss 
 Martineau upon O' Conn ell. They are all based upon what a humorous 
 writer has called the ' fiend-in-human-shape theory.' Miss Martineau not 
 merely assumes that O'Connell was insincere and untrustworthy, but dis- 
 courses of him on the assumption that he was knowingly and purposely a 
 villain. Not only does she hold that his Repeal agitation was an unquali- 
 fied evil for his country, and that Repeal, if gained, would have been a 
 curse to it, but she insists that O'Connell himself was thoroughly convinced 
 of the facts. She devotes whole pages of lively and acrid argument to 
 prove, not only that O'Connell was ruining his country, but that he knew 
 he was ruining it, and persevered in his wickedness out of pure self-seeking. 
 No writer possessed of one-tenth of Miss Martineau's intellect and education 
 would now reason after that fashion about any public man. If there is 
 any common delusion of past days which may be taken as entirely ex- 
 ploded now, it is the idea that any man ever swayed vast masses of people, 
 and became the idol and the hero of a nation, by the strength of a con- 
 scious hypocrisy and imposture. 
 
 O'Connell in this Repeal year, as he called it, was by far the most 
 prominent politician in these countries who had never been in office. He 
 had been the patron of the Melbourne Ministry, and his patronage had 
 proved banefnl to it. One of the great causes of the detestation in which 
 the Melbourne Whigs were held by a vast number of English people was 
 their alleged subserviency to the Irish agitator. We cannot be surprised 
 if the English public just then was little inclined to take an impartial 
 estimate of O'Connell. He had attacked some of their public men in 
 language of the fiercest denunciation, lie had started an agitation which 
 seemed as if it were directly meant to bring about a break-up of the Im- 
 perial system so lately completed by the Act of Union. He was opposed 
 to the existence of the State Church in Ireland. He was the bitter enemy 
 of the Irish landlord class of the landlords, that is to say, who took their
 
 1S43. A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES 147 
 
 title iii any way from England. He was familiarly known in the graceful 
 controversy of the time as the ' Big Beggarman.' It was an article of faith 
 with the general public that he was enriching himself at the expense of a 
 poor and foolish people. It is a matter of fact that he had given up a 
 splendid practice at the bar to carry on his agitation ; that he lost by the 
 agitation, pecuniarily, far more than he ever got by it; that he had not 
 himself received from first to last anything like the amount of the noble 
 tribute so becomingly and properly given to Mr. Cobden, and so honour- 
 ably accepted by him ; and that he died poor, leaving his sons poor. 
 Indeed, it is a remarkable evidence of the purifying nature of any great 
 political cause, even where the object sought is but a phantom, that it is 
 hardly possible to give a single instance of a great political agitation carried 
 on in these countries and in modern times by leaders who had any primar^ 
 purpose of making money. But at that time the general English public 
 were firmly convinced that O'Connell was simply keeping up his agitation 
 for the sake of pocketing ' the rent.' Some of the qualities, too, that spe- 
 cially endeared him to his Celtic countrymen made him particularly objec- 
 tionable to Englishmen; and Englishmen have never been famous for 
 readiness to enter into the feelings and accept the point of view of other 
 peoples. O'Connell was a thorough Celt. He represented all the impul- 
 siveness, the quick-changing emotions, the passionate, exaggerated loves 
 and hatred, the heedlessness of statement, the tendency to confound im- 
 pressions with facts, the ebullient humour all the other qualities that are 
 especially characteristic of the Celt. The Irish people were the audience 
 to which O'Connell habitually played. It may indeed be said that even 
 in playing to this audience he commonly played to the gallery. As the 
 orator of a popular assembly, as the orator of a monster meeting, he pro 
 bably never had an equal in these countries. He had many of the physical 
 endowments that are especially favourable to success in such a sphere. He 
 had a herculean frame, a stately presence, a face capable of expressing 
 easily and effectively the most rapid alternations of mood, and a voice 
 which all hearers admit to have been almost unrivalled for strength and 
 sweetness. Its power, its pathos, its passion, its music have been described 
 in words of positive rapture by men who detested O'Connell, and who 
 would rather if they could have denied to him any claim on public atten- 
 tion, even in the matter of voice. He spoke without studied preparation, 
 and of course had all the defects of such a style. He fell into repetition 
 and into carelessness of construction ; he was hurried away into exaggera- 
 tion and sometimes into mere bombast. But he had all the peculiar suc- 
 cess, too, which rewards the orator who can speak without preparation. 
 lie -always s-poke right to the hearts of his hearers. On the platform or in 
 
 x. 2
 
 148 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XH 
 
 Parliament, whatever he said was said to his audience, and was never in 
 the nature of a discourse delivered over their heads. He entered the 
 House of Commons when he was nearly fifty-four years of age. Most 
 persons supposed that the style of speaking he had formed, first in addres- 
 sing juries, and next in rousing Irish mobs, must cause his failure when 
 he came to appeal to the unsympathetic and fastidious House of Commons. 
 But it is certain that O'Connell became one of the most successful Parlia- 
 mentary orators of his time. Lord Jeffrey, a professional critic, declared 
 that all other speakers in the House seemed to him only talking schoolboy- 
 talk after he had heard O'Connell. No man we now know of is less likely 
 to be carried away by any of the claptrap arts of a false demogogic style 
 than Mr. Roebuck ; and Mr. Koebuck has said that he considers O'Connell 
 the greatest orator he ever heard in the House of Commons; Charles 
 Dickens, when a reporter in the gallery, where he had few equals, if any, 
 in his craft, put down his pencil once when engaged in reporting a speech 
 of O'Connell's on one of the tithe riots in Ireland, and declared that he 
 could not take notes of the speech, so moved was he by its pathos. Lord 
 Beaconsfield, who certainly had no great liking for O'Connell, has spoken 
 in terms as high as any one could use about his power over the House. 
 But O'Connell's eloquence only helped him to make all the more enemies 
 in the House of Commons. He was reckless even there in his denuncia- 
 tion, although he took care never to obtrude on Parliament the extravagant 
 and unmeaning abuse of opponents which delighted the Irish mob meetings. 
 O'Connell was a crafty and successful lawyer. The Irish peasant, like 
 the Scottish, is, or at least then was, remarkably fond of litigation. He 
 delighted in the quirks and quibbles of law, and in the triumphs won by 
 the skill of lawyers over opponents. He admired O'Connell all the more 
 when O'Connell boasted and proved that he could drive a coach and six 
 through any Ace of Parliament. One of the pet heroes of Irish legend is 
 a personage whose cleverness and craft procure for him a sobriquet which 
 has been rendered into English by the words ' twists upon twists and tricks 
 \ipon tricks.' O'Connell was in the eyes of many of the Irish peasantry 
 -in embodiment of ' twists upon twists and tricks upon tricks,' enlisted in 
 their cause for the confusion of their adversaries. He had borne the leading 
 part in carrying Catholic Emancipation. He had encountered all the 
 danger and responsibility of the somewhat aggressive movement by which 
 it was finally secured. It is true that it was a reform which in the course 
 of civilisation must have been carried. It had in its favour all the en- 
 lightenment of the time. The eloquence of the greatest orators, the intel- 
 lect of the truest philosophers, the prescience of the wisest statesmen had 
 pleaded for it and helped to make its way clear. No one can doubt that
 
 k848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 149 
 
 it must in a short time have been carried if O'Connell had never lived. 
 But il was carried just then by virtue of O'Connell's bold agitation and by 
 the wise resolve of the Tory Government not to provoke a civil war. It 
 is deeply to be regretted that Catholic Emancipation was not conceded to 
 the claims of justice. Had it been so yielded, it is very doubtful whether 
 we should ever have heard much of the Repeal agitation. But the Irish 
 people saw, and indeed all the world was made aware of the fact, that 
 emancipation would not have been conceded just then at least but for the 
 fear of civil disturbance. To an Englishman looking coolly back from a 
 distance, the difference is clear between granting to-day rather than pro- 
 voke disturbance that which everyone sees must be granted some time, 
 and conceding what the vast majorrty of the English people believe can 
 never with propriety or even safety be granted at all. But we can hardly 
 wonder if the Irish peasant did not make such distinctions. All he knew 
 was that O'Connell had demanded Catholic Emancipation, and had been 
 answered at first by a direct refusal ; that he had said he would compel its 
 concession, and that in the end it was conceded to him. When, therefore, 
 O'Connell said that he would compel the Government to give him repeal 
 of the Union, the Irish peasant naturally believed that he could keep his 
 word. 
 
 Nor is there any reason to doubt that O'Connell himself believed in 
 the possibility of accomplishing his purpose. We are apt now to think of 
 the Union between England and Ireland as of time-honoured endurance. 
 It had been scarcely thirty years in existence when O'Connell entered 
 Parliament. The veneration of ancient lineage, the majesty of custom, 
 the respect due to the ' wisdom of our ancestors ' none of these familiar 
 claims could be urged on behalf of the legislative union between England 
 and Ireland. To O'Connell it appeared simply as a modern innovation 
 which had nothing to be said for it except that a majority of Englishmen 
 had by threats and bribery forced it on a majority of Irishmen. Mr. 
 Lecky, the author of the ' History of European Morals,' may be cited as an 
 impartial authority on such a subject. Let us see what he says, in his 
 work on 'The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland,' with regard to the 
 movement for repeal of the Union, of which it seems almost needless to 
 say he disapproves. ' O'Connell perceived clearly,' says Mr. Lecky, ' that 
 the tendency of affairs in Europe was towards the recognition of the 
 principle that a nation's will is the one legitimate rule of its government. 
 All rational men acknowledged that the Union was imposed on Ireland by 
 corrupt means contrary to the wish of one generation. O'Connell was 
 prepared to show, by the protest of the vast majority of the people, that it 
 was retained without the acquiescence of the next. He had allied himself
 
 150 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES CH. xn. 
 
 with the parties that were rising surely and rapidlj to power in England 
 with the democracy, whose gradual progress is effacing the most 
 venerable landmarks of the Constitution with the Free Traders, whose 
 approaching triumph he had hailed and exulted in from afar. He had 
 perceived the possibilitj of forming a powerful party in Parliament, which 
 would be free to co-operate with all English parties without coalescing 
 with any, and might thus turn the balance of factions and decide the fate 
 of Ministries. He saw, too, that while England in a time of peace might 
 resist the expressed will of the Irish nation, its policy would be necessarily 
 modified in time of war ; and he predicted that should there be a collision 
 with France while the nation was organised as in 1843, Eepeal would be 
 the immediate and the inevitable consequence. In a word, he believed 
 that under a constitutional government the will of four-fifths of a nation, 
 if peacefully, perseveringly and energetically expressed, must sooner or 
 later be triumphant. If a war had broken out during the agitation if 
 the life of O'Connell had been prolonged ten years longer if any worthy 
 successor had assumed his mantle if a fearful famine had not broken the 
 spirit of the people who can say that the agitation would not have been 
 successful?' No one, we fancy, except those who are always convinced 
 that nothing can ever come to pass which they think ought not to come to 
 pass. At all events, if an English political philosopher, surveying the 
 events after a distance of thirty years, is of opinion that Eepeal was 
 possible, it is not surprising that O'Connell thought its attainment possible 
 at the time when he set himself to agitate for it. Even if this be not con- 
 ceded, it will at least be allowed that it is not very surprising if the Irish 
 peasant saw no absurdity in the movement. Our system of government 
 by party does not lay claim to absolute perfection. It is an excellent 
 mechanism on the whole ; it is probably the most satisfactory that the 
 wit of man has yet devised for the management of the affairs of a state ; 
 but its greatest admirers will bear to be told that it has its drawbacks and 
 disadvantages. One of these undoubtedly is found in the fact that so few 
 reforms are accomplished in deference to the claims of justice, in com- 
 parison with those that are yielded to the pressure of numbers. A great 
 English statesman in our own day once said that Parliament had done 
 many just things, but few things because they were just. O'Connell and 
 the Irish people saw that Catholic Emancipation had been yielded to 
 pressure rather than to justice ; it is not wonderful if they thought that 
 pressure might prevail as well in the matter of Repeal. 
 
 In many respects O'Connell differed from more modern Irish Nation- 
 alists. He was a thorough Liberal. He was a devoted opponent of negro 
 slavery; he was a staunch Free Trader; he was a friend of popular
 
 1843. A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. 151 
 
 education ; he was an enemy to all excess ; he was opposed to strikes ; he 
 was an advocate of religious equality everywhere ; and he declined to re- 
 ceive the commands of the Vatican in his political agitation. ' I am a 
 Catholic, but I am not a Papist,' was his own definition of his religious 
 attitude. He preached the doctrine of constitutional ngitation strictly, arm 
 declared that no political Reform waa worth the shedding of one drop of 
 blood. It may he asked how it came about that with all these excellent 
 attributes, which all critics now allow to him, O'Connell was so detested 
 by the vast majority of the English people. One reason undoubtedly is 
 that O'Connell deliberately revived and worked up for his political pur- 
 poses the almost extinct national hatreds of Celt and Saxon. As a phrase 
 of political controversy, he may be said to have invented the word 
 ' Saxon.' He gave a terrible license to his tongue. His abuse was out- 
 rageous ; his praise was outrageous. The very effusiveness of his loyalty 
 told to his disadvantage. People could not understand how one who per- 
 petually denounced ' the Saxon ' could be so enthusiastic and rapturous in 
 his professions of loyalty to the Saxon's Queen. In the common opinion 
 of Enolishmen, all the evils of Ireland, all the troubles attaching to the 
 connection between the two countries, had arisen from this unmitigated, 
 rankling hatred of Celt for Saxon. It was impossible for them to believe 
 *;hat a man who deliberately applied all the force of his eloquence to revive 
 it could be a genuine patriot. It appeared intolerable that while thus 
 labouring to make the Celt hate the Saxon he should yet profess an 
 extravagant devotion to the Sovereign of England. Yet O'Connell was 
 probably quite sincere in his professions of loyalty. He was in no sense 
 a revolutionist. He had from his education in a French College acquired 
 an early detestation of the principles of the French Revolution. Of the 
 Irish rebels of '98 he spoke with as savage an intolerance as the narrowest 
 English Tories could show in speaking of himself. The Tones, and 
 Emmetts, and Fitzgeralds, whom so many of the Irish people adored, were, 
 in O'Connell's eyes, and in his words, only ' a gang of miscreants.' He 
 grew angry at the slightest expression of an opinion among his followers 
 that seemed to denote even a willingness to discuss any of the doctrines of 
 Communism. His theory and his policy evidently were that Ireland was 
 to be saved by a dictatorship entrusted to himself, with the Irish priest- 
 hood acting as his officers and agents. He maintained the authority of 
 the priests, and his own authority by means of them and over them. The 
 political system of the country for the purposes of agitation was to be a 
 sort of hierarchy ; the parish priests occupying the lowest grade, the 
 bishops standing on the higher steps, and O'Connell himself supreme as 
 fche pontiff over all.
 
 152 A HISTORY OF OUB OWN TIMES. CH. xn. 
 
 He had a Parliamentary system by means of which he proposed to 
 approach more directly the question of Eepeal of the Union. He got 
 seats in the House of Commons for a number of his sons, his nephews, 
 and his sworn retainers. ' O'Connell's tail ' was the precursor of ' the 
 Pope's Brass Band ' in the slang of the House of Commons. He had an 
 almost supreme control over the Irish constituencies, and whenever a 
 vacancy took place he sent down the Eepeal candidate to contest it. He 
 always inculcated and insisted on the necessity of order and peace. In- 
 deed, as he proposed to carry on his agitation altogether by the help of 
 the bishops and the priests, it was not possible for him, even were he so 
 inclined, to conduct it on any other than peaceful principles. ' The man 
 who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy,' was a maxim which he 
 was never weary of impressing upon his followers. The temperance 
 movement set on foot with such remarkable and sudden success by Father 
 Mathew was at once turned to account by O'Connell. He was himself, 
 in his later years at all events, a very temperate man, and he was delighted 
 at the prospect of good order and discipline which the Temperance move- 
 ment afforded. Father Mathew was very far from sharing all the political 
 opinions of O'Connell. The sweet and simple friar, whose power was 
 that of goodness and enthusiasm only, and who had but little force of 
 character or intellect, shrank from political agitation, and was rather Con- 
 servative than otherwise in his views. But he could not afford to repu- 
 diate the support of O Connell, who on all occasions glorified the 
 Temperance movement, and called upon his followers to join it, and was 
 always boasting of his ' noble army of Teetotallers.' It was probably when 
 he found that the mere fact of his having supported the Melbourne 
 Government did so much to discredit that Government in the eyes of 
 Englishmen and to bring about its fall, that O'Connell went deliberately 
 out of the path of mere Parliamentary agitation, and started that system of 
 agitation by monster meeting which lias since his time been regularly 
 established among us as a principal part of all political organisation for a 
 definite purpose. He founded in Dublin a Repeal Association which met 
 in a place on Burgh Quay, and which he styled Conciliation Hall. 
 Around him in this Association he gathered his sons, his relatives, his 
 devoted followers, priestly and lay. The Nation newspaper, then in its 
 youth and full of a fresh literary vigour, was one of his most brilliant 
 instruments. At a later period of the agitation it was destined to be used 
 against him, and with severe effect. The famous monster meetings were 
 usually held on a Sunday, on some open spot, mostly selected for its 
 historic fame, and with all the picturesque surroundings of hill and stream. 
 From the dawn of the summer day the Eepealers were thronging to the
 
 1843. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 153 
 
 scene of the meeting. They came from all parts of the neighbouring 
 country for miles and miles. They were commonly marshalled and 
 guided by their parish priests. They all attended the services of their 
 Church before the meeting began. The influence of his religion and of 
 his patriotic feelings was brought to bear at once upon the impressionable 
 and emotional Irish Celt. At the meeting O'Connell and several of his 
 chosen orators addressed the crowd on the subject of the wrongs done to 
 Ireland by ' the Saxon,' the claims of Ireland to the restoration of her old 
 Parliament in College Green, and the certainty of her having it restored if 
 Irishmen only obeyed O'Connell and their priests, were sober, and dis- 
 played their strength and their unity. 
 
 O'Connell himself, it is needless to say, was always the great orator of 
 the day. The agitation developed a great deal of literary talent among 
 the younger men of education ; but it never brought out a man who was 
 even spoken of as a possible successor to O'Connell in eloquence. His 
 magnificent voice enabled him to do what no genius and no eloquence less 
 aptly endowed could have done. He could send his lightest word thrilling 
 to the extreme of the vast concourse of people whom he desired to move. 
 lie swayed them with the magic of an absolute control. lie understood 
 all the moods of his people ; to address himself to them came naturally to 
 him. He made them roar with laughter ; he made them weep ; he made 
 them thrill with indignation. As the shadow runs over a field, so the im- 
 pression of his varying eloqiience ran over the assemblage. He com- 
 manded the emotions of his hearers as a consummate conductor sways the 
 energies of his orchestra. Every allusion told. When, in one of the 
 meetings held in his native Kerry, he turned solemnly round and appealed 
 to ' yonder blue mountains where you and I were cradled ' ; or in sight of 
 the objects he described he apostrophised Ireland as the ' land of the green 
 valley and the rushing river ' an admirable characteristic and complete 
 description ; or recalled some historical association connected with the 
 scene he surveyed each was some special appeal to the instant feelings of 
 his peculiar audience. Sometimes he indulged in the grossest and what 
 ought to have been the most ridiculous flattery of his hearers flattery 
 which would have offended and disgusted the dullest English audience, 
 But the Irish peasant, with all his keen sense of the ridiculous in others, 
 is singularly open to the influence of any appeal to his own vanity. 
 There is a great deal of the ' eternal-womanly ' in the Celtic nature ; and 
 it is not easy to overflatter one of the race. Doubtless O'Connell knew 
 this and acted purposely on it ; and this was a peculiarity of his political 
 conduct which it would be hard indeed to commend or even to defend. 
 But in truth he adopted in his agitation the tactics he had employed at the
 
 154 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xn 
 
 bar. ' A good speech is a good thing,' he used to say ; ' but the verdict is 
 the thing.' His flattery of his hearers was not grosser than his abuse of 
 all those whom they did not like. His dispraise often had absolutely no 
 meaning in it. There was no sense whatever in calling the Duke of 
 Wellington ' a stunted corporal ' ; one might as well have called Mont 
 Blanc a molehill. Nobody could have shown more clearly than O'Connell 
 did that he did not believe the Times to be ' an obscure rag.' It would 
 have been as humorous and as truthful to say that there was no such 
 paper as the Times. But these absurdities made an ignorant audience 
 laugh for the moment, and O'Connell had gained the only point he just 
 then wanted to carry. He would probably have answered any one who 
 remonstrated with him on the disingenuousness of such sayings as Mrs. 
 Thrale says Burke once answered her when she taxed him with a want of 
 literal accuracy, by quoting ' Odds life, must one swear to the truth of a 
 song ? ' But this recklessness of epithet and description did much to 
 make O'Connell distrusted and disliked in England, where, in whatever 
 heat of political controversy, words are supposed to be the expressions of 
 some manner of genuine sentiment. Of course many of O'Connell's 
 abusive epithets were not only full of humour, but did to some extent 
 fairly represent the weaknesses at- least of those against whom they were 
 directed. Some of his historical allusions were of a more mischievous 
 nature than any mere personalities could have been. ' Peel and Welling- 
 ton,' he said at Kilkenny, ' may be second Cromwells ; they may get 
 Cromwell's blunted truncheon, and they may oh, sacred heavens ! 
 enact on the fair occupants of that gallery ' (pointing to the ladies' 
 gallery), 'the murder of the Wexford women. Let it not be supposed 
 that when I made that appeal to the ladies it was but a night of my 
 imagination. No ! when Cromwell entered the town of Wexford by 
 treachery, three hundred ladies, the beauty and loveliness of Wexford, the 
 young and the old, the maid and the matron, were collected round the 
 Cross of Christ ; they prayed to heaven for mercy, and I hope they found 
 it ; they prayed to the English for humanity, and Cromwell slaughtered 
 them. I tell you this : three hundred women, the grace and beauty and 
 virtue of Wexford, were slaughtered by the English ruffians sacred 
 heaven ! ' He went on then to assure his hearers that ' the ruffianly 
 Saxon paper, the Times, in the number received by me to-day, presumes 
 to threaten us again with such a scene.' One would like to see the copy 
 of the Times which contained such a threat, or indeed any words that 
 could be tortured into a semblance of any such hideous meaning. But the 
 great agitator, when he found he had excited enough the horror of his 
 audience, proceeded to reassure them by the means of all others most ob-
 
 1843. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 155 
 
 jectionablc and dangerous at such a time. 'I am not imaginative,' he said, 
 ' when I talk of the possibility of such scenes anew ; but yet I assert that 
 there is no danger to our women now, for the men of Ireland would die 
 to the last in their defence.' Here the whole meeting broke into a storm 
 of impassioned cheering. ' Ay,' the orator exclaimed, when the atorm 
 found a momentary hush, ' we were a paltry remnant then ; we are 
 millions now.' At Mullaghmast, O'Connell made an impassioned allusion 
 to the massacre of Irish chieftains, said to have taken place on that very 
 spot in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. ' Three hundred and ninety Irish 
 chiefs perished here ! They came, confiding in Saxon honour, relying on 
 the protection of the Queen, to a friendly conference. In the midst of 
 revelry, in the cheerful light of the banquet house, they were surrounded 
 and butchered. None returned save one. Their wives were widows, 
 their children fatherless. In their homesteads was heard the shrill shriek 
 of despair the cry of bitter agony. Oh, Saxon cruelty, how it cheers my 
 heart to think that you dare not attempt such a deed again ! ' It is not 
 necessary to point out what the effect of such descriptions and such allu- 
 sions must have been upon an excitable and an ignorant peasant audience 
 on men who were ready to believe in all sincerity that England only 
 wanted the opportunity to re-enact in the reign of Queen Victoria the 
 scenes of Elizabeth's or Cromwell's day. 
 
 The late Lord Lytton has given, in his poem, ' St. Stephens,' a pictu- 
 resque description of one of these meetings and of the effect produced upon 
 himself by O'Connell's eloquence. ' Once to my sight,' he says, ' tho 
 giant thus was given ; walled by wide air and roofed by boundless 
 heaven.' He describes ' the human ocean ' lying spread out at the giant's 
 feet ; its ' wave on wave ' flowing ' into space away.' Not unnaturally, 
 Lord Lytton thought 'no clarion could have sent its sound even to the 
 centre ' of that crowd. 
 
 And as I thought, rose the sonorous swell 
 
 As from some church tower swings the silvery bell ; 
 
 Aloft and clear from airy tide to tide, 
 
 It glided easy as a bird may glide. 
 
 To the last verge of that vast audience sent, 
 
 It played with each wild passion as it went ; 
 
 Now stirred the uproar now the murmur stiller?, 
 
 And sobs or laughter answered as it willed. 
 
 Then did I know what spells of infinite choice 
 
 To rouse or lull has the sweet human voice. 
 
 Then did I learn to seize the sudden clue 
 
 To the grand troublous life antique to view, 
 
 Under the rock-stand of Demosthenes, 
 
 Unstable Athens heave her noisv seas.
 
 156 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xii 
 
 The crowds who attended the monster meetings came in a sort of 
 military order and with a certain parade of military discipline. At the 
 meeting held on the Hill of Tara, where O'Connell stood beside the stone 
 said to have been used for the coronation of the ancient monarchs of 
 Ireland, it is declared on the authority of careful and unsympathetic wit- 
 nesses that a quarter of a million of people must have been present. The 
 Government naturally felt that there was a very considerable danger in 
 the massing together of such vast crowds of men in something like mili- 
 tary array and under the absolute leadership of one man, who openly 
 avowed that he had called them together to show England what was the 
 strength her statesmen would have to fear if they continued to deny Repeal 
 to his demand. It is certain now that O'Connell did not at any time mean 
 to employ force for the attainment of his ends. But it is equally certain 
 that he wished the English Government to see that he had the command 
 of an immense number of men, and probably even to believe that he 
 would, if needs were, hurl them in rebellion upon England if ever she 
 should be embarrassed with a foreign war. It is certain, too, that many 
 of O'Connell's most ardent admirers, especially among the young men, 
 were fully convinced that some day or other their leader would call on 
 them to fight, and were much disappointed when they found that he had 
 no such intention. The Government at last resolved to interfere. A 
 meeting was announced to be held at Clontarf on Sunday, October 8, 
 1843. Clontarf is near Dublin, and is famous in Irish history as the 
 Bcene of a great victory of the Irish over their Danish invaders. It was 
 intended that this meeting should surpass in numbers and in earnestness 
 the assemblage at Tara. On the very day before the eighth the Lord 
 Lieutenant issued a proclamation prohibiting the meeting as ' calculated 
 to excite reasonable and well-grounded apprehension,' in that its object 
 was ' to accomplish alterations in the laws and constitution of the realm by 
 intimidation and the demonstration of physical force.' O'Connell's power 
 over the people was never shown more effectively than in the control 
 which at that critical moment he was still able to exercise. The popula- 
 tions were already coming in to Clontarf in streams from all the country 
 round, when the proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant was issued. No 
 doubt the Irish Government ran a terrible risk when they delayed so long 
 the issue of their proclamation. With the people already assembling in 
 such masses, the risk of a collision with the police and the soldiery, and of 
 a consequent massacre, is something still shocking to contemplate. It is 
 not surprising, perhaps, if O'Connell and many of his followers made it a 
 charge against the Government that they intended to bring about such a 
 collision in order to make an example of some of the Kepealers and thus
 
 1843. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 157 
 
 strike terror through the country. Some sort of collision would almost 
 undoubtedly have occurred but for the promptitude of O'Connell himself. 
 He at once issued a proclamation of his own to which the populations 
 were likely to pay far more attention than they would to anything 
 coming from Dublin Castle. O'Connell declared that the orders of the 
 Lord Lieutenant must be obeyed ; that the meeting must not take place ; 
 and that the people must return to their homes. The ' uncrowned king,' 
 as some of his admirers loved to call him, was obeyed, and no meeting 
 was held. 
 
 From that moment, however, the great power of the Repeal agitation 
 was gone. The Government had accomplished far more by their pro- 
 clamation than they could possibly have imagined at the time. They had, 
 without knowing it, compelled O'Connell to show his hand. It was now 
 made clear that he did not intend to have resort to force. From that hour 
 there was virtually a schism between the elder Kepealers and the younger. 
 The young and fiery followers of the great agitator lost all faith in him. 
 It would in any case have been impossible to maintain for any very long 
 time the state of national tension in which Ireland had been kept. It 
 must soon come either to a climax or to an anti-climax. It came to an 
 anti-climax. All the imposing demonstrations of physical strength lost 
 their value when it was made positively known that they were only 
 demonstrations, and that nothing was ever to come of them. The eye 01 
 an attentive foreigner was then fixed on Ireland and on O'Connell ; the 
 eye of one destined to play a part in the political history of our time 
 which none other has surpassed. Count Cavour had not long returned to 
 his own country from a visit made with the express purpose of studying 
 the politics and the general condition of England and Ireland. He wrote 
 to a friend about the crisis then passing in Ireland. ' When DUO is at a 
 distance,' he said, ' from the theatre of events, it is easy to make pro- 
 phecies which have already been contradicted by facts. But according to 
 my view O'ConnelFs fate is sealed. On the first vigorous demonstration 
 of his opponents he has drawn back ; from that moment he has ceased to 
 be dangerous.' Cavour was perfectly right. It was never again possible 
 to bring the Irish people up to the pitch of enthusiasm which O J Connell 
 had wrought them to before the suppression of the Clontarf meeting ; and 
 before long the Irish national movement had split in two. 
 
 The Government at once proceeded to the prosecution of O'Connell 
 and some of his principal associates. Daniel O'Connell himself, his son 
 John, the late Sir John Gray, and Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, were the most 
 conspicuous of those against whom the prosecution was directed. They 
 were charged with conspiring to raise and excite disaffection among he;
 
 158 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. ca. xn 
 
 Majesty's subjects, to excite them to hatred and contempt of the Govern- 
 ment and Constitution of the realm. The trial was in many ways a 
 singularly unfortunate proceeding. The Government prosecutor objected 
 to all the Catholics whose names were called as jurors. An error of the 
 sheriffs in the construction of the jury-lists had already reduced by a con- 
 siderable number the roll of Catholics entitled to serve on juries. It 
 therefore happened that the greatest of Irish Catholics, the representative 
 Catholic of his day, the principal agent in the work of carrying Catholic 
 Emancipation, was tried by a jury composed exclusively of Protestants. 
 It has only to be added that this was done in the metropolis of a country 
 essentially Catholic; a country five-sixths of whose people were Catholics; 
 and on a question affecting indirectly, if not directly, the whole position 
 and claims of Catholics. The trial was long. O'Connell defended him- 
 self; and his speech was universally regarded as wanting the power that 
 had made his defence of others so effective in former days. It was for the 
 most part a sober and somewhat heavy argument to prove that Ireland had 
 lost instead of gained by her union with England. The jury found 
 O'Connell guilty along with most of his associates, and he was sentenced 
 to twelve months' imprisonment and a fine of 2,OOOZ. The others received 
 lighter sentences. O'Connell appealed to the House of Lords against the 
 sentence. In the meantime he issued a proclamation to the Irish people 
 commanding them to keep perfectly quiet and not to commit any offence 
 against the law. ' Every man,' said one of his proclamations, ' who is 
 guilty of the slightest breach of the peace is an enemy of me and or 
 Ireland.' The Irish people took him at his word and remained perfectly 
 quiet. 
 
 O'Connell and his principal associates were committed to Eichmond 
 Prison, in Dublin. The trial had been delayed in various ways, and the 
 sentence was not pronounced until May 24, 1844. The appeal to the 
 House of Lords we may pass over intermediate stages of procedure 
 was heard in the following September. Five law lords were present. 
 The Lord Chancellor (Lord Lyndhurst) and Lord Brougham were of 
 opinion that the sentence of the court below should be affirmed. Lord 
 Denman, Lord Cottenham, and Lord Campbell were of the opposite 
 opinion. Lord Denman, in particular, condemned the manner in which 
 the jury-lists had been prepared. Some of his words on the occasion 
 became memorable, and passed into a sort of proverbial expression. Such 
 practices, he said, would make of the law, ' a mockery, a delusion and a 
 snare.' A strange and memorable scene followed. The constitution of 
 the House of Lords then and for long after made no difference between 
 law lords and others in voting on a question of appeal. As a matter of
 
 1844. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 159 
 
 practice and of fairness, the lay peers hardly ever interfered in the voting 
 on an appeal. But they had an undoubted right to do so ; arid it is ever- 
 certain that in one or two peculiar cases they had exercised the right. If 
 the lay lords were to vote in this instance, the fate of O'Connell and his 
 companions could not be doubtful. O'Connell had always been the bitter 
 enemy of the House of Lords. Pie had vehemently denounced its 
 authority, its practices, and its leading members. Nor, if the lay peers 
 had voted and confirmed the judgment of the court below, could it have 
 been positively said that an injustice was done by their interference. The 
 majority of the judges on the writ of error had approved the judgment of 
 the court below. In the House of Lords itself the Lord Chancellor and 
 Lord Brougham were of opinion that the judgment ought to be sustained. 
 There would, therefore, have been some ground for maintaining that the 
 substantial justice of the case had been met by the action of the lay peers. 
 On the other hand, it would have afforded a ground for a positive outcry 
 in Ireland if a question purely of law had been decided by the votes of 
 lay peers against their bitter enemy. One peer, Lord Wharncliffe, made 
 a timely appeal to the better judgment and feeling of his brethren. He 
 urged them not to take a course which might allow anyone to say that 
 political or personal feeling had prevailed in a judicial decision of the 
 House of Lords. The appeal had its effect. A moment before one lay 
 peer at least had openly declared that he would insist on his right to vote. 
 \\ hen the Lord Chancellor was about to put the question in the first 
 instance, to ascertain in the usual way whether a division would be 
 necessary, several lay peers seemed as if they were determined to vote. 
 But the appeal of Lord Wharncliffe settled the matter. All the lay peers 
 at once withdrew and left the matter according to the usual course in the 
 hands of the law lords. The majority of these being against the judg- 
 ment of the court below, it was accordingly reversed, and O'Connell and 
 his associates were set at liberty. The propriety of a lay peer voting on a 
 question of judicial appeal was never raised again so long as the appellate 
 jurisdiction of the House of Lords was still exercised in the old and now 
 obsolete fashion. 
 
 Nothing could well have been more satisfactory and more fortunate in 
 its results than the conduct of the House of Lords. The effect upon the 
 mind of the Irish people would have been deplorable if it had been seen 
 that O'Connell was convicted by a jury on which there were no Roman 
 Catholics, and that the sentence was confirmed, not by a judicial, but by 
 a strictly political vote of the House of Lords. As it was, the influence 
 of the decision, which proved that even in the assembly most bitterly 
 denounced by O'Connell he could receive fair play, was in the highest
 
 1 60 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xii. 
 
 degree satisfactory. It cannot be doubted that it did something to weaken 
 the force of O'Connell's own denunciations of Saxon treachery and wrong- 
 doing. The influence of O'Connell was never the same after the trial. 
 Many causes combined to bring about this result. Most writers ascribe it 
 above all to the trial itself, and the evidence it afforded that the English 
 Government were strong enough to prosecute and punish even O'Connell 
 if he provoked them too far. It is somewhat surprising to find intelligent 
 men like Mr. Green, the author of ' A Short History of the English 
 People,' countenancing such a belief. If the House of Lords had, by the 
 votes of the lay peers, confirmed the sentence on O'Connell, he would 
 have come out of his prison at the expiration of: his period of sentence 
 more popular and more powerful than ever. Had his strength and faculty 
 of agitation lasted, he might have agitated thenceforth with more effect 
 than ever. If the Clontarf meeting had not disclosed to a large section of 
 his followers that his policy after all was only to be one of talk, he might 
 have come out of prison just the man he had been, the leader of all classes 
 of Catholics and Nationalists. But the real blow given to O'Connell's 
 popularity was given by O'Connell himself. The moment it was made 
 clear that nothing was to be done but agitate, and that all the monster 
 meetings, the crowds and banners and bands of music, the marshalling and 
 marching and reviewing, meant nothing more than Father Mathew's tem- 
 perance meetings meant that moment all the youth of the movement fell 
 off from O'Connell. The young men were very silly, as after events 
 proved. O'Connell was far more wise, and had an infinitely better esti- 
 mate of the strength of England than they had. But it is certain that 
 the young men were disgusted with the kind of gigantic sham which the 
 great agitator seemed to have been conducting for so long a time. It 
 would have been impossible to keep up for ever such an excitement as 
 that which got together the monster meetings. Such heat cannot be 
 brought up to the burning point and kept there at will. A reaction was 
 inevitable. O'Connell was getting old, and had lived a life of work and 
 wear and tear enough to break down even his constitution of iron. He 
 had kept a great part of his own followers in heart, as he had kept the 
 Government in alarm, by leaving it doubtful whether he would not in the 
 vnd make an appeal to the reserve of physical force which he so often 
 loasted of having at his back. When the whole secret was out, he ceased 
 ,o be an object of fear to the one and of enthusiasm to the other. It 
 was neither the Lord Lieutenant's proclamation nor the prosecution by the 
 Government that impaired the influence of O'Connell. It was O'Connell's 
 own proclamation declaring for submission to the law that dethroned him. 
 From that moment the political monarch had to dispute with rebels for
 
 1846. A HISTORY OF OUit OWN TIMES. lb'1 
 
 his crown ; and the crown loll off in the struggle:, like that winch I'hland 
 tells of in the pretty poem. 
 
 For the Clontarf meeting had been the climax. There was ;ill man- 
 ner of national rejoicing when the decision of the House of Lords set 
 O'Connell and his fellow-prisoners free. There were illuminations and 
 banquets and meetings and triumphal processions, renewed declarations of 
 allegiance to the great leader, and renewed protestations on his part that 
 Repeal was coming. But his reign was over. His death may as well be 
 recorded here as later. His health broke down ; and the disputes in 
 which he became engaged with the Young Irelanders, dividing his 
 party into two hostile camps, were a grievous burthen to him. In Lord 
 Beaconsfield's Life of Lord George Bentinck, a very touching description 
 is given of the last speech made by O'Connell in Parliament. It was on 
 April 3, 1846 : ' His appearance,' says Mr. Disraeli, ' was of great debility, 
 and the tones of his voice were very still. His words indeed only reached 
 those who were immediately around him, and the Ministers sitting on the 
 other side of the green table, and listening with that interest and respectful 
 attention which became the occasion.' O'Connell spoke for nearly two 
 hours. ' It was a strange and touching spectacle to those who remembered 
 the form of colossal energy and the clear and thrilling tones that had once 
 startled, disturbed and controlled senates. ... To the House generally it 
 was a performance in dumb show : a feeble old man muttering before a 
 table ; but respect for the great Parliamentary personage kept all as 
 orderly as if the fortunes of a party hung upon his rhetoric ; and though 
 not an accent reached the gallery, means were taken that next morning 
 the country should not lose the last and not the least interesting of the 
 speeches of one who had so long occupied and agitated the mind of 
 nations.' 
 
 O'Connell became seized with profound melancholy. Only one desire 
 seemed left to him, the desire to close his stormy career in Rome. The 
 Eternal City is the capital, the shrine, the Mecca of the Church to which 
 O'Connell was undoubtedly devoted with all his heart. He longed to 
 lie down in the shadow of the dome of St. Peter's and rest there, and 
 there die. His youth had been wild in more ways than one, and he had 
 long been under the influence of a profound penitence. He hud killed a man 
 in a duel, and was through all his after life haunted by regret for the deed, 
 although it was really forced on him, and he had acted only as any other 
 man of his time would have acted in such conditions. But now in his old 
 and sinking days all the errors of his youth and his strong manhood came 
 back upon him, and he longed to steep the painful memories in the sacred 
 influences of Rome. He hurried to Italy at a time when the prospect of 
 
 VOL. 7. M
 
 162 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. x!i. 
 
 the famine darkening down upon his country cast an additional shadow 
 across his outward path. He reached Genoa, and he went no farther. 
 His strength wholly failed him there, and he died, still far from Rome, on 
 May 15, 18-17. The close of his career was a mournful collapse ; it was 
 like the sudden crumbling in of some stately and commanding tower. 
 The other day, it seemed, he filled a space of almost unequalled breadth 
 and height in the political landscape ; and now he is already gone. ' Even 
 with a thought the rack dislimbs, and makes it indistinct, as water is in 
 water.' 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 PKKL'S ADMINISTRATION. 
 
 SOMI: important steps in the progress of what may be described as social 
 legislation are part of the history of Peel's Government. The Act of Parlia- 
 ment which prohibited absolutely the employment of women and girls 
 in mines and collieries was rendered unavoidable by the fearful exposures 
 made through the instrumentality of a Commission appointed to enquire 
 into the whole subject. This Commission was appointed on the motion of 
 the then Lord Ashley, since better known as the Earl of Shaftesbury, a man 
 who during the whole of a long career has always devoted himself some- 
 times wisely and successfully, sometimes indiscreetly and to little purpose, 
 always with disinterested and benevolent intention to the task of brighten- 
 ing the lives and lightening the burthens of the working classes and the 
 poor. The Commission found many hideous evils arising from the em- 
 ployment of women and girls underground, and Lord Ashley made such 
 effective use of their disclosures that he encountered very little opposition 
 when he came to propose restrictive legislation. In some of the coal mines 
 women were literally employed as beasts of burden. Where the seam of 
 coal was too narrow to allow them to stand upright, they had to crawl 
 back and forward on all fours for fourteen or sixteen hours a day dragging 
 the trucks laden with coals. The trucks were generally fastened to a 
 chain which passed between the legs of the unfortunate women, and was 
 then connected with a belt which was strapped round their naked waists. 
 Their only clothing often consisted of an old pair of trowsers made of 
 slicking ; and they were uncovered from the waist up uncovered, that is to 
 say, except for the grime and filth that collected and clotted around them. 
 All manner of hideous diseases were generated in these unsexed bodies. 
 Unsexed almost literally some of them became ; for their chests were often 
 hard and ilat as those of men ; and not a few of them lost all reproductive
 
 IH44. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 1(J3 
 
 puwi-r: a happy condition truly under tin: circumstances, where women 
 who bore children only went up to the higher air for a week during their 
 confinement, and were then back at their work again. It would be .super- 
 fluous to say that the immorality engendered by such a state of things was 
 in exact keeping with the other evils which it brought about. Lord 
 Ashley had the happiness and the honour of putting a stop to this in- 
 famous sort of labour lor ever by the Act of 1842, which declared that, 
 after a certain limited period, no woman or girl whatever should be em- 
 ployed in mines and collieries. 
 
 Lord Ashley was less completely successful in his endeavour to secure 
 uten hours' limitation for the daily labour of women aud young persons in 
 factories. By a vigorous annual agitation on the general subject of fac- 
 tory labour, in which Lord Ashley had followed in the footsteps of Mr. 
 Michael Thomas Sadler, he brought the Government up to the point ol 
 undertaking legislation on the subject. They first introduced a bill which 
 combined a limitation of the labour of children in factories with a plan 
 for compulsory education among the children. The educational clauses of 
 the bill had to be abandoned in consequence of a somewhat narrow- 
 minded opposition among the Dissenters, who feared that too much ad- 
 vantage was given to the Church. Afterwards the Government brought 
 in another bill, which became in the end the Factories Act of 1844. It 
 was during the passing of this measure that Lord Ashley tried unsuccess- 
 fully to introduce his ten hours' limit. The bill diminished the working 
 hours of children under thirteen years of age, and fixed them at six and 
 a half hours each day ; extended somewhat the time during which they 
 were to be under daily instruction, and did a good many other useful and 
 wholesome things The principle of legislative interference to protect 
 youthful workers in fiictories had been already established by the Act of 
 1833; and Lord Ashley's agitation only obtained for it a somewhat ex- 
 tended application. It has since that time again and again received 
 further extension ; and in this time, as in the former, there is a constant 
 controversy going on as to whether its principles ought not to be so extended 
 as to guard in almost every way the labour of adult women, and even of adult 
 men. The controversy during Lord Ashley's agitation was always warm 
 and often impassioned. Many thoroughly benevolent men and women 
 could not bring themselves to believe that any satisfactory and permanent 
 results could come of a legislative interference with what might be called 
 the freedom of contract between employers and employed. They argued 
 that it was idle to say the interference was only made or sought in the 
 case of women and boys ; for if the women and boys stop off working, 
 they pointed out, the men must perforce in most, cases stop off working 
 
 M '.'
 
 164 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. PH. xm. 
 
 too. Some of the public men afterwards most justly popular among the 
 English artisan classes were opposed to the measure on the ground that 
 it was a heedless attempt to interfere with fixed economic laws. It 
 was urged too, and with much semblance of justice, that the interference 
 of the State for the protection or the compulsory education of children in 
 factories would have been much better employed, and was far more loudly 
 called for, in the case of the children employed in agricultural labour. The 
 lot of a factory child, it was contended, is infinitely better in most respects 
 than that of the poor little creature who is employed in holloaing at the 
 crows on a farm. The mill-hand is well cared for, well paid, well able to 
 care for himself and his wife and his family, it was argued ; but what of 
 the miserable Giles Scroggina of Dorsetshire or Somersetshire, who never 
 has more in all his life than just enough to keep body and soul together ; 
 and for whom, at the close, the workhouse is the only haven of rest? 
 Why not legislate for him at least for his wife and children ? 
 
 Neither point requires much consideration from us at present. We 
 have to recognise historical facts ; and it is certain that this country has 
 made up its mind that for the present and for a long time to come Parlia- 
 ment will interfere in whatever way .seems good to it with the conditions 
 on which labour is carried on. There has been indeed a very marked 
 advance or retrogression, whichever men may please to call it, in public 
 opinioirsinee the ten hours' agitation. At that time compulsory education 
 and the principles of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Act would have seemed 
 alike impossible to most persons in this country. The practical mind of 
 the Englishman carries to an extreme the dislike ;md contempt for what 
 the French call les principes in politics. Therefore we oscillate a good 
 deal, the pendulum swinging now very far in the direction of non-inter- 
 ference with individual action, and now still farther in the direction of 
 universal interference and regulation what was once humorously describee] 
 as grandmotherly legislation. With our recent experiences we can only 
 be surprised that a few years ago there was such a repugnance to the 
 modest amount of interference with individual rights which Lord Ashley's 
 extremest proposals would have sought to introduce. As regards the 
 other point, it is certain that Parliament will at one time or another do ibr 
 the children in the fields something very like that which it has done for 
 the children in the factories. It is enough for us to know that practically 
 the factory legislation has worked very well; and that the non inter- 
 ference in the fields is a far heavier responsibility on the conscience of 
 Parliament than interference in the factories. 
 
 Many other tilings done by Sir llobert Peel's Government aroused 
 bitter controversy and agitation. In one or two remarkable instances
 
 IR.M. A HISTORY OF OUIl OWN TIMES. 1 fin 
 
 the ministerial policy went near to producing that discord in the Con- 
 servative party which we shall presently see break out into passion and 
 schism when Peel came to deal with the Corn Laws. There was, for 
 example, the grant to the Koman Catholic College of Maynooth, a College 
 for the education specially of young men who sought to enter the ranks 
 of the priesthood. The grant was riot a new thing. Since before the 
 Act of Union a grant had been made for the college. The Government 
 of Sir Robert Peel only proposed to make that which was insufficient 
 sufficient ; to enable the college to be kept in repair and to accomplish 
 the purpose for which it was founded. As Macaulay put it, there was no 
 more question of principle involved than there would be in the sacrifice of 
 a pound instead of a pennyweight on some particular altar. Yet the minis- 
 terial proposition called up a very tempest of clamorous bigotry all over the 
 country. What Macaulay described in fierce scorn as ' the bray of Exeter 
 Hall ' was heard resounding every day and night. Peel carried his mea- 
 sure, although nearly half his own party in the House of Commons voted 
 against it on the second reading. The whole controversy has little interest 
 now. Perhaps it will be found to live in the memory of many persons, 
 chiefly because of the quarrel it caused between Macaulay and his Edin- 
 burgh constituents, and of the annual motion for the withdrawal of the 
 grant which was so long afterwards one of the regular bores of the House 
 of Commons. Many of us can well remember the venerable form of the 
 late Mr. Spooner as year after year he addressed an apathetic, scanty and 
 half -amused audience, pottering over his papers by the light of two candles 
 specially placed for his convenience on the table in front of the Speaker, 
 and endeavouring in vain to arouse England to serious attention on the 
 subject of the awful fate she was preparing for herself by her toleration 
 of the principles of Rome. The Maynooth grant was abolished indeed 
 not long after Mr. Spooner's death ; but the manner of its abolition would 
 have given him less comfort even than its introduction. It was abolished 
 when Mr. Gladstone's Government abolished the State Church in Ire- 
 land. 
 
 Another of Peel's measures which aroused much clamour on both 
 sides was that for the establishment of what were afterwards called the 
 ' godless colleges ' in Ireland. O'Connell has often had the credit of apply- 
 ing this nickname to the new colleges ; but it was in fact from the 
 extremes! of all no-popery men, Sir Robert Harry Inglis, that the expres- 
 sion came. It was indeed from Sir Robert Inglis's side that the first ncto 
 sounded of opposition to the scheme, although O'Connell afterwards took 
 it vigorously up, and the Pope and the Irish bishops condemned the 
 colleges.
 
 H>6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xm. 
 
 There was objection within the Ministry, as well as without, to the 
 Maynooth grant. Mr. Gladstone, who had been doing admirable work, 
 first as Vice-President, and afterwards as President, of the Board of 
 Trrade, resigned his office because of this proposal. He acted, perhaps, 
 with a too sensitive chivalry. He had written a work, as all the world 
 knows, on the relations of Church and State, and he did not think the 
 views expressed in that book left him free to co-operate in the ministerial 
 measure. Some staid politicians were shocked, many more smiled, not a 
 few sneered. The public in general applauded the spirit of disinterested- 
 ness which dictated the young statesman's act. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, however, supported the Queen's College scheme by 
 voice and vote. The proposal of the Government was to establish in 
 Ireland three colleges one in Cork, the second in Belfast, and the third in 
 Galway and to affiliate these to a new university to be called the ' Queen's 
 University in Ireland.' The teaching in these colleges was to be purely 
 secular. Nothing could be more admirable than the intentions of Peel 
 and his colleagues. Nor could it be denied that there might have been 
 good seeming hope for a plan w r hich thus proposed to open a sort of 
 neutral ground in the educational controversy. But from both sides of 
 the House and from the extreme party in each Church came an equally 
 fierce denunciation of the proposal to separate secular from religious edu- 
 cation. Nor surely could the claim of the Irish Catholics be said even by 
 the warmest advocate of undenominational education to have no reason 
 on its side. The small minority of Protestants in Ireland had their 
 college and their university established as a distinctively Protestant insti- 
 tution. Why should not the great majority who were Catholics ask for 
 something of the same kind for themselves ? Peel carried his measure ; 
 but the controversy has gone on ever since, and we have yet to see whether 
 the scheme is a success or a failure. 
 
 One small instalment of justice to a much injured and long-suffering 
 religious body was accomplished without any trouble by Sir Robert Peel's 
 Government. This was the bill for removing the test by which Jew:> 
 were excluded from certain municipal offices. A Jew might be high 
 sheriff of a county, or Sheriff of London ; but, with an inconsistency 
 which was as ridiculous as it was narrow-minded, he was prevented from 
 becoming a mayor, an alderman, or even a member of the Common 
 Council. The oath which had to be taken included the Avords ' on the 
 true faith of a Christian.' Lord Lyndhurst, the Lord Chancellor, intro- 
 duced a measure to get rid of this absurd anomaly ; and the House of 
 Lords, who had firmly rejected similar proposals of relief before, passed 
 it without any difficulty. It was of course passed by the House of Com-
 
 ,44. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 107 
 
 mons, which had done its best ti introduce the reform in previous sessions, 
 and without success. 
 
 The Bank Charter Act, separating the issue from the banking depart- 
 ment of the Bank of England, limiting the issue of notes to a fixed amount 
 of securities, and requiring the whole of the further circulation to be on 
 a basis of bullion, and prohibiting the formation of any new banks of 
 issue, is a characteristic and an important measure of Peel's Government. 
 To Peel, too, we owe the establishment of the income tax on its present 
 basis a doubtful boon. The copyright question was at least advanced 
 a stage. Railways Avere regulated. The railway mania and railway panic 
 also belong to this active period. The country went wild with railway 
 speculation. The South Sea scheme was hardly more of a bubble or 
 hardly burst more suddenly or disastrously. The vulgar and flashy suc- 
 cesses of one or two lucky adventurers turned the heads of the whole 
 community. For a time it seemed to be a national article of faith that 
 the capacity of the country to absorb new railway schemes and make 
 them profitable was unlimited, and that to make a fortune one had only 
 to take shares in anything. 
 
 An odd feature of the time was the outbreak of what were called the 
 Rebecca riots in Wales. These riots arose out of the anger and impatience 
 of the people at the great increase of toll-bars and tolls on the public 
 roads. Some one, it was supposed, had hit upon a passage in Genesis 
 which supplies a motto for their grievance and their complaint. ' And 
 they blessed Rebekah and said unto her ... let thy seed possess the 
 gate of those which hate them.' They set about accordingly to possess 
 very effectually the gates of those which hated them. Mobs assembled 
 every night, destroyed turnpikes and dispersed. They met with little 
 molestation in most cas^s for a while. The mobs were always led by a 
 man in woman's clothes, supposed to represent the typical Rebecca. As 
 the disturbances went on, it was found that no easier mode of disguise 
 could be got than a woman's clothes, and therefore in many of the riots 
 petticoats might almost be said to be the uniform of the insurgent force. 
 Night after night for months these midnight musterings took place. 
 Rebecca and her daughters became the terror of many regions. As the 
 work went on it became more serious. Rebecca and her daughters grew 
 bold. There were conflicts with the police and with the soldiers. It is 
 to be feared that men and even women died for Rebecca. At last the 
 Government succeeded in ptitting clown the riots, and had the wisdom to 
 appoint a Commission to inquire into the cause of so much disturbance ; 
 and the Commission, as will readily be imagined, found that there were 
 genuine grievances at the bottom of the popular excitement. The farmers
 
 IfiS A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xni. 
 
 and the labourers were poor ; the tolls were seriously oppressive. The 
 Government dealt lightly with most of the rioters who had been captured, 
 and introduced measures which removed the grievances most seriously 
 complained of Rebecca and her daughters were heard of no more. They 
 had made out their case, and done in their wild mumming way something 
 of a good work. Only a short time before the rioters would have been 
 shot down and the grievances would have been allowed to stand. Rebecca 
 and her short career mark an advancement in the political and social 
 history of England. 
 
 Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, brought himself and the 
 Government into some trouble by the manner in which he made use of 
 the power invested in the Administration for the opening of private letters. 
 Mr. Duncombe, the Eadical member for Finsbury, presented a petition 
 from Joseph Mazzini and others complaining that letters addressed to them 
 had been opened in the Post Office. Many of Mazzini's friends, and per- 
 haps Mazzini himself, believed that the contents of these letters had been 
 communicated to the Sardinian and Austrian Governments, and that as a 
 result men who were supposed to be implicated in projects of insurrection 
 on the Continent had actually been arrested and put to death. Sir James 
 Graham did not deny that he had issued a warrant authorising the opening 
 of some of Mazzini's letters ; but he contended that the right to open 
 letters had been specially reserved to the Government on its responsibility, 
 that it had always been exercised, but by him with special caution and 
 moderation ; and that it would be impossible for any Government abso- 
 lutely to deprive itself of such a right. The public excitement was at first 
 very great ; but it soon subsided. The reports of Parliamentary com- 
 mittees appointed by the two Houses showed that all Governments 
 had exercised the right, but naturally with decreasing frequency and 
 greater caution of late years ; and that there was no chance now of its 
 being seriously abused. No one, not even Thomas Carlyle, who had 
 written to the Times in generous indignation at the opening of Mazzini's 
 letters, went so far as to say that such a right should never be exercised. 
 Carlyle admitted that he would tolerate the practice ' when some new 
 Gunpowder Plot may be in the wind, some double-dyed high treason or 
 imminent national wreck not avoidable otherwise.' In the particular case 
 of Mazzini it seemed an odious trick, and everyone was ashamed of it. 
 Such a feeling was the surest guard against abuse for the future, and the 
 matter was allowed to drop. The minister is to be pitied who is com- 
 pelled even by legitimate necessity to have recourse to such an expedient ; 
 he would be despised now by every decent man if he turned to it without 
 such justification. Many years had to pass away before Sir James Graham
 
 1844. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Ui9 
 
 was free from innuendoes and attacks on the ground that he had tampered 
 with the correspondence of an exile. One remark, on the other hand, it, 
 is right to make. An exile is sheltered in a country like England on the 
 assumption that he docs not involve her in responsibility and danger by 
 using her protection as a shield behind which to contrive plots and organise 
 insurrections against foreign governments. It is certain that Mazzini did 
 make use of the shelter England gave him for such a purpose. It would 
 m the end be to the heavy injury of all fugitives from despotic rule, if to 
 shelter them brought such consequences on the countries that offered them 
 a home. 
 
 The Peel Administration was made memorable by many remarkable 
 events at home as well as abroad. It had, as we have seen, inherited wars 
 and brought them to a close : it had wars of its own. Scinde was annexed 
 by Lord Ellenborough in consequence of the disputes which had arisen 
 between us and the Ameers, whom we accused of having broken faith with 
 us. They were said to be in correspondence with our enemies, which may 
 possibly have been true, and to have failed to pay up our tribute, which 
 was very likely. Anyhow we found occasion for an attack on Scinde ; and 
 the result was the total defeat of the Princes and their army, and the 
 annexation of the territory. Sir Charles Napier won a splendid victory 
 splendid, that is, in a military sense over an enemy outnumbering him 
 by more than twelve to one at the battle of Meeanee; and Scinde was ours. 
 Peel and his colleagues accepted the annexation. None of them liked if, ; 
 but none saw how it could be undone. There was nothing to be proud of 
 in the matter, except the courage of our soldiers, and the genius of Sir 
 Charles Napier, one of the most brilliant, daring, successful, eccentric, and 
 self-conceited captains who had ever fought in the service of England sinco 
 the days of Peterborough. Later on the Sikhs invaded our territory by 
 crossing the Sutlej in great force. Sir Hugh Gough, afterwards Lord 
 Gough, fought several fierce battles with them before he could conquer 
 them ; and even then they were only conquered for the time. 
 
 We were at one moment apparently on the very verge of what must 
 have proved a far more serious war much nearer home, in consequence of 
 the dispute that arc.se between this country and France about Tahiti and 
 Queen Pomare. Queen Pomare was sovereign of the island of Tahiti, in 
 the South Pacific, the Otaheite of Captain Cook. She was a pupil of some 
 of our missionaries, and was very friendly to England and its people. She 
 had been induced or compelled to put herself and her dominion under the 
 protection of France : a step which was highly displeasing to her subjects. 
 Some ill-feeling towards the French residents of the island was shown ; 
 and the French admiral, who had induced or compelled the Queen to put
 
 170 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xiti. 
 
 herself under French protection, now suddenly appeared off the coast, and 
 called on her to hoist the Frencn flag above her own. She refused ; and 
 he instantly effected a landing on the island, pulled down her flag, raised 
 that of France in its place, and proclaimed that the island was French 
 territory. The French admiral appears to have been a hot-headed, thought- 
 less sort of man, the Commodore Wilkes of his day. His act was at once 
 disavowed by the French Government, and condemned in strong terms by 
 M. Guizot. But Queen Pomare had appealed to the Queen of England 
 for assistance. ' Do not cast me away, my friend,' she said ; ' I run to you 
 for refuge, to be covered under your great shadow, the same that afforded 
 relief to my fathers by your fathers, who are now dead, and whose king- 
 doms have descended to us the weaker vessels.' A large party in France 
 allowed themselves to become inflamed with the idea that British intrigiie 
 was at the bottom of the Tahiti people's dislike to the protectorate of 
 France, and that England wanted to get Queen Potnare's dominions for 
 herself. They cried out therefore that to take down the flag of France 
 from its place in Tahiti would be to insult the dignity of the French 
 nation, and to insult it at the instance of England. The cry was echoed 
 in the shrillest tones by a great number of French newspapers. Where 
 the flag of France has once been hoisted, they screamed, it must never be 
 taken down; which is about equivalent to saying that if a man's officious 
 servant carries off the property of some one else and gives it to his master, 
 the master's dignity is lowered by his consenting to hand it back to its 
 owner. In the face of this clamour the French Government, although 
 they disavowed any share in the filibustering of their admiral, did not 
 show themselves in great haste to undo what he had done. Possibly they 
 found themselves in something of the same difficulty as the English 
 Government in regard to the annexation of Scinde. They could not 
 perhaps with great safety to themselves have ventured to be honest all at 
 once ; and in any case they did not want to give up the protectorate of 
 Tahiti. While the more hot-headed on both sides of the English Channel 
 were thus snarling at each other, the difficulty Avas immensely complicated 
 by the seizure of a missionary named Pritchard, who had been our consul 
 in the island up to the deposition of Pomare. A French sentinel had been 
 attacked, or was said to have been attacked, in the night, and in con- 
 sequence the French commandant seized Pritchard in reprisal, declaring 
 him to be 'the only mover and instigator of disturbances among the 
 natives.' Pritchard was flung into prison, and only released to be expelled 
 from the island. He came home to England with his story; and his 
 arrival was the signal for an outburst of indignation all over the country. 
 Sir Kobert Peel and Lord Aberdeen alike stigmatised the treatment of
 
 i814. A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 171 
 
 Pritchard as a gross and intolerable outrage; and satisfaction \vas demanded 
 of the French Government. The King and M. Guizot were both willing 
 that full justice should be done, and both anxious to avoid any occasion 
 of ill-feeling with England. The King had lately been receiving with 
 effusive show of affection a visit from our Queen in France, and was about 
 to return it. But so hot was popular passion on both sides, that it would 
 have needed stronger and juster natures than those of the King arid his 
 minister to venture at once on doing the right thing. It was on the last 
 day of the Session of 1844, September 5, that Sir Robert Peel was able to 
 announce that the French Government had agreed to compensate Pritchard 
 for his sufferings and losses. Queen Pomarc was nominally restored to 
 power, but the French protection proved as stringent as if it were ;i sove- 
 reign rule. She might as well have pulled down her flag, for all the sove- 
 reign right it secured to her. She died thirty-four years after, and her 
 death recalled to the memory of the English public the long-forgotten fact 
 that she had once so nearly been the cause of a war between England and 
 France. 
 
 The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon Treaty belong alike to the 
 history of Peel's Administration. The Ashburton Treaty btars date 
 August 9, 1842, and arranges finally the north-western boundary between 
 the British Provinces of North America and the United Stoles. For 
 many years the want of any clear and settled understanding as to the 
 boundary line between Canada and the State of Maine had been a source 
 of some, disturbance, and of much controversy. Arbitration between 
 England and the United States had been tried and failed, both parties de- 
 clining the award. Sir Robert Peel sent out Lord Ashburton, formerly 
 Mr. Baring, as plenipotentiary, to Washington, in 1842, and by his intelli- 
 gent exertions an arrangement was come to which appears to have given 
 mutual satisfaction ever since, despite of the sinister prophesyings of Lord 
 Palmerston at the time. The Oregon question was more complicated, and 
 was the source of a longer controversy. More than once the dispute about 
 the boimdary line in the Oregon region had very nearly become ao occasion 
 for war between England and the United States. In Canning's time there 
 was a crisis during which, to quote the words of an English statesman, war 
 could have been brought about by the holding up of a finger. The ques- 
 tion in dispute was as to the boundary line between English and American 
 territory west of the Rocky Mountains. It had seemed a matter of little 
 importance at one time, when the country west of the Rocky Mountains 
 was regarded by most persons as little better than a desert idle. But when 
 the vast capacities and the splendid future of the Pacific slope began to be 
 recognised, and the importance to us of some station and harbour there
 
 172 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xm 
 
 came to be more and more evident, the dispute naturally swelled into a 
 question of vital interest to both nations. In 1818 an attempt at arrange- 
 ment was made, but failed. The two governments then agreed to leave 
 the disputed regions to joint occupation for ten years, alter which the 
 subject was to be opened again. When the end of the first term came 
 near, Canning did his best to bring about a settlement, but failed. The 
 dispute involved the ownership of the mouth of the Columbia River, and 
 of the noble island which bears the name of Vancouver, off the shore of 
 British Columbia. The joint occupancy was renewed for an indefinite 
 time; but in 1843, the President of the United States somewhat peremp- 
 torily called for a final settlement of the boundary. The question was 
 eagerly taken up by excitable politicians in the American House of Repre- 
 sentatives. For more than two years the Oregon question became a party 
 cry in America. With a. large proportion of the American public, in- 
 cluding, of course, nearly all citizens of Irish birth or extraction, any 
 President would have been popular beyond measure who had forced a war 
 on England. Calmer and wiser counsels prevailed, however, on both sides. 
 Lord Aberdeen, our Foreign Secretary, was especially moderate and con- 
 ciliatory. He offered a compromise which was at last accepted. On June 
 15, 1846, the Oregon Treaty settled the question for that time at least; 
 the dividing line was to be ' the forty-ninth degree of latitude, from the 
 Rocky Mountains west to the middle of the channel separating Vancouver's 
 Island from the mainland ; thence southerly through the middle of the 
 channel and of Fuca's Straits to the Pacific.' The channel and straits were 
 to be free, as also the great northern branch of the Columbia River. In 
 other words, Vancouver's Island remained to Great Britain, and the free 
 navigation of the Columbia River was secured. We have said that the 
 question was settled, 'for that time ; ' because an important part of it came 
 up again for settlement many years after. The commissioners appointed 
 to determine that portion of the boundary which was to run southerly 
 through the middle of the channel were unable to come to any agreement 
 on the subject, and the divergence rf the claims made on one side and the 
 other constituted a new question, which became a part of the famous 
 Treaty of Washington in 1871, and was finally settled by the arbitration 
 of the Emperor oi: Germany. But it is much to the honour of the Peel 
 Administration that a dispute which had for years been charged with 
 possibilities of war, and had become a stock subject of political agitation 
 in America, should have been so far settled as to be removed ibr ever after 
 out of the category of disputes which suggest an appeal to arms. This was 
 one of the last acts of Peel's Government, and it was not the least of the 
 great things he had done. We have soon to tell how it came about that
 
 18-15. A HISTORY OK OUR OWN TIM KM. I 7 !> 
 
 it was one of his latest triumphs, and how an Administration wliicli had 
 come into power with such splendid promise, and had accomplished so 
 much in such various fields of legislation, was brought so suddenly to a 
 fall. The story is one of the most remarkable and important chapters in 
 the history of English politics and parties. 
 
 During Peel's time we catch a last glimpse of the famous Arctic navi- 
 gator, Sir John Franklin, lie sailed on the expedition which was doomed 
 to be his last, on May 26, 1845, with his two vessels, Erebus and Terror, 
 Not much more is heard of him as among the living. We may say of 
 him as Carlyle says of La Perouse, ' The brave navigator goes and returns 
 not; the seekers search far seas for him in vain; only some mournful 
 mysterious shadow of him hovers long in all heads and hearts.' 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 I'llKK TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 
 
 FEW chapters of political history in modern times have given occasion for 
 more controversy than that which contains the story of Sir Robert Peel's 
 Administration in its dealing with the Corn Laws. Told in the briefest 
 form, the story is that Peel came into office in 184-1 to maintain the Corn 
 Laws, and that in 184G he repealed them. The controversy as to the 
 wisdom or unwisdom of repealing the Corn Laws has long since come to 
 an end. They who were the uncompromising opponents of Free Trade 
 at that time are proud to call themselves its uncompromising zealots now. 
 Indeed, there is no more chance of a reaction against Free Trade in England 
 than there is of a reaction against the rule of three. But the controversy 
 still exists, and will probably always be in dispute, as to the conduct of 
 Sir Robert Peel. 
 
 The Melbourne Ministry fell, as we have seen, in consequence of a 
 direct vote of want of confidence moved by their leading opponent, and 
 the return of a majority hostile to them at the general election that followed. 
 The vote of want of confidence was levelled against their financial policy, 
 especially against Lord John Russell's proposal to substitute a fixed duty 
 of eight shillings for Peel's sliding scale. Sir Robert Peel came into office, 
 and he introduced a reorganised scheme of a sliding scale, reducing the 
 
 O o 7 C^ 
 
 duties and improving the system, but maintaining the principle. Lord 
 John Russell proposed an amendment declaring that the House of Commons, 
 ' considering the evils which have been caused by the present Corn Laws. 
 and especially by the fluctuation of the graduated or sliding scale, is not
 
 174 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. :nv. 
 
 prepared to adopt the measure of her Majesty's Government, which is 
 founded on the same principles, and is likely to be attended by similar 
 results.' The amendment was rejected by a large majority, no less than 
 one hundred and twenty-three. But the question between Free Trade and 
 Protection Avas even more distinctly raised. Mr. Villiers proposed another 
 amendment declaring for the entire abolition of all duties on grain. Only 
 ninety votes were given for the amendment, while three hundred and ninety- 
 three were recorded against it. Sir Robert Peel's Government, therefore, 
 came into power distinctly pledged to uphold the principle of protection 
 for home-grown grain. Four years after this Sir Robert Peel proposed 
 the total abolition of the corn duties. For this he was denounced by some 
 members of his party in language more fierce and unmeasured than ever 
 since has been applied to any leading statesman. Mr. Gladstone was never 
 assailed by the staunchest supporter of the Irish Church in words so vitu- 
 perative as those which rated Sir Robert Peel for his supposed apostacy. 
 One eminent person at least made his first fame as a Parliamentary orator 
 by his denunciations of the great Minister whom he had previously eulogised 
 and supported. 
 
 ' The history of agricultural distress,' it has been well observed, ' is the 
 history of agricultural abundance.' This looks at first sight a paradox ; but 
 nothing can in reality be more plain and less paradoxical. ' Whenever,' to 
 follow out the passage, ' Providence, through the blessing of genial seasons, 
 fills the nation's stores with plenteousness, then and then only has the cry 
 of ruin to the cultivator been proclaimed as the one great evil for legisla- 
 tion to repress.' This is indeed the very meaning of the principle of 
 protection. When the commodity which the protected interest has to 
 dispose of is so abundant as to be easily attained by the common body of 
 consumers, then of course the protected interest is injured in its particular 
 way of making money, and expects the State to do something to secure it 
 in the principal advantage of its monopoly. The greater quantity of grain 
 a good harvest brings for the benefit of all the people, the less the price 
 the corn-grower can charge for it. His interest as a monopolist is always 
 and inevitably opposed to the interest of the community. 
 
 But it is easy even now, when we have almost forgotten the days of 
 protection, to see that the corn-grower is not likely either to recognise or 
 to admit this conflict of interests between his protection and the public wel- 
 fare. Apart from the natural tendency of every man to think that that 
 which does him good must do pood to the community, there was un- 
 doubtedly something very fascinating in the theory of protection. It had 
 a charming give and take, live and let live, air about it. ' You give me a 
 little more than the market price for my corn, and don't you see I shall be
 
 IS-n-C. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 175 
 
 dole to buy all the more of your cloth and tea and sugar, or to pay you 
 the higher rent for your land?' Such a compact seems reasonable and 
 tempting. Almost up to our own time the legislation of the country was in 
 the hands of the classes who had more to do with the growing of corn and 
 the ownership of land than with the making of cotton and the working of 
 machinery. The great object of legislation and of social compacts of 
 whatever kind seemed to be to keep the rents of the landowners and 
 prices of the farmers up to a comfortable standard. It is not particularly 
 to the discredit of the landlords and the farmers that this was so. We 
 have seen in later times how every class in succession has resisted the 
 movement of the principle of free trade when it came to be applied to 
 its own particular interests. The paper manufacturers liked it as little in 
 I860 as the landlords and farmers had done fifteen years earlier. When 
 the cup comes to be commended to the lips of each interest in turn, we 
 always find that it is received as a poisoned chalice, and taken with much 
 shuddering and passionate protestation. The particular advantage pos- 
 sessed by vested interests in the Corn Laws was that for a long time the 
 landlords possessed all the legislative power and all the prestige as well. 
 There was a certain reverence and sanctity about the ownership of land, 
 with its hereditary descent and its patriarchal dignities, which the manu- 
 facture of paper could not pretend to claim. 
 
 If it really were true that the legitimate incomes or the legitimate in- 
 lluence of the landlord class in England went down in any way because of 
 the repeal of the Corn Laws, it would have to be admitted that the land- 
 lords, like the aristocrats before the French Revolution, had done something 
 themselves to encourage the growth of new and disturbing ideas. Before 
 the Revolution, free thought and the equality and brotherhood of man 
 were beginning to be pet doctrines among the French nobles and their 
 wives and daughters. It was the whim of the hour to talk Rousseau, and 
 to affect indifference to rank and a general faith in a good time coming of 
 equality and brotherhood. In something of the same fashion the aris- 
 tocracy of England were for some time before the repeal of the Corn Laws 
 illustrating a sort of revival of patriarchal ideas about the duties of pro- 
 perty. The influence was .stirring everywhere. Oxford was beginning to 
 busy itself in the revival of the olden influence of the Church. The Young 
 England party, as they were then called, were ardent to restore the good 
 old days when the noble was the father of the poor and the chief of his 
 neighbourhood. All manner of pretty whimsies were caught up by this 
 ruling idea to give them an appearance of earnest purpose. The young 
 landlord exhibited himself in the attitude of a protector, patron and friend 
 to all his tenants. Doles were formally given at stated hours to all whc
 
 176 A HISTOE? OF OUR OWN TIMES. . xif. 
 
 would come for them to the custle gate. Young noblemen played cricket 
 with the peasants on their estate, and the Saturnian age was believed by a 
 good many persons to be returning for the express benefit of Old, or rather of 
 Young, England. There was something like a party being formed in Par- 
 liament for the realisation of Young England's idyllic purposes. It com- 
 prised among its members several more or less gifted youths of rank, who 
 were full of enthusiasm and poetic aspirations and nonsense ; and it had 
 the encouragement and support of one man of genius, who had no natural 
 connection with the English aristocracy, but who was afterwards destined 
 to be the successful leader of the Conservative and aristocratic party ; to 
 be its saviour when it was all but down in the dust ; to guide it to victory, 
 and make it once more, for the time at least, supreme in the political life 
 of the country. This brilliant champion of Conservatism has often spoken 
 of the repeal of the Corn Laws as the fall of the landlord class in England. 
 If the landlords fell, it must be said of them, as has been fairly said 
 of many a dynasty, that they never deserved better on the whole than just 
 at the time when the blow struck them down. 
 
 The famous Corn Law of 1815 was a copy of the Corn Law of 1670. 
 The former measure imposed a duty on the importation of foreign grain 
 which amounted to prohibition. Wheat might be exported upon the pay- 
 ment of one shilling per quarter customs duty; but importation was 
 practically prohibited until the price of wheat had reached eighty shillings 
 a quarter. The Corn Law of 1815 was hurried through Parliament, 
 absolutely closing the ports against the importation of foreign grain until 
 the price of our home-grown grain had reached the magic figure of eighty 
 shillings a quarter. It was hurried through, despite the most earnest 
 petitions from the commercial and manufacturing classes. A great deal of 
 popular disturbance attended the passing of the measure. There were 
 riots in London, and the houses of several of the supporters of the bill 
 were attacked. Incendiary fires blazed in many parts of the country. In 
 die Isle of Ely there were riots which lasted for two days and two nights, 
 and the aid of the military had to be called in to suppress them. Five 
 persons were hanged as the result of these disturbances. One might 
 excuse a demagogue who compared the event to the suppression of some 
 of the food riots in France just before the Revolution, of which we only 
 read that the people the poor, that is to say turned out demanding 
 bread, and the ringleaders were immediately hanged, and there was an 
 end of the matter. After ihe Corn Law of 1815, thus ominously intro- 
 duced, there were Sliding Scale Acts, having for their business to establish 
 a varying system of duty, so that, according as the price of home-produced 
 wheat rose to a certain height, the duty on imported wheat sank in pro-
 
 1836. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 17? 
 
 portion. The principle of all these measures was the same. It was founded 
 on the assumption that the corn grew for the benefit of the grower first of 
 all; and that until he had been secured in a handaomo profit the public 
 at large had no right to any reduction in the cost of food. When the 
 harvest was a good one, and the golden grain was plenty, then the soul of 
 the grower was afraid, and he called out to Parliament to protect him 
 ngainst the calamity of having to sell his corn any cheaper than he did in 
 years of famine. lie did not, see all the time that if the prosperity of the 
 country in general was enhanced, he too must come to benefit by it. 
 
 Naturally, it was in places like Manchester that the fallacy of all this 
 theory was first commonly perceived and most warmly resented. The 
 Manchester manufacturers saw that the customers for their goods were to 
 be found in all parts of the world ; and they knew that at every turn they 
 were hampered in their dealings with the customers by the system of pro- 
 tective duties. They wanted to sell their goods wherever they could find 
 buyers, and they chafed at any barrier between them and the sale. Man- 
 chester, from the time of its first having Parliamentary representation 
 only a few years before the foundation of the Anti-Corn Law League 
 had always spoken out for Free Trade. The fascinating sophism which 
 had such charms for other communities, that by paying more than was 
 actually necessary for everything all round, Dick enriched Tom, while 
 Tom was at the same time enriching Dick, had no charms for the intelli- 
 gence and the practical experience of Manchester. The close of the year 
 1836 was a period of stagnant trade and general depression, arising, in 
 some parts of the country, to actual and severe suffering. Some members 
 of Parliament and other influential men were stricken with the idea, which 
 it does not seem to have required much strength of observation to foster, 
 that it could not be for the advantage of the country in general to have 
 the price of bread very high at a time when Avages were very low and 
 work Avas scarce. A moA^cment against the Corn LaAvs began in London. 
 An Anti-Corn LaAV Association on a small scale Avas formed. Its list of 
 members bore the names of more than twenty members of Parliament, and 
 for a time the society had a look of vigour about it. It came to nothing, 
 however. London has ne\ r er been found an effective nursery of agitation. 
 It is too large to have any central interest or source of action. It is too 
 dependent socially and economically on the patronage of the hiirhcr and 
 wealthier classes. London has never been to England Avhat Paris has 
 been to France. It has hardly ever made or represented thoroughly the 
 public opinion of England during any great crisis. A neAv contro ot 
 operations soon had to be sought, and various causes combined to make 
 Lancashire the proper place. In the year 1838 the town of TV.'fnn-le- 
 
 VOL I. N
 
 17 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. s:v. 
 
 Moors, in Lancashire, was the victim of a terrible commercial crisis. 
 Thirty out of the fifty manufacturing establishments which the town 
 contained were closed ; nearly a fourth of all the houses of business were 
 closed and actually deserted ; and more than five thousand workmen were 
 without homes or means of subsistence. All the intelligence and energy 
 of Lancashire was roused. One obvious guarantee against starvation was 
 cheap bread, and cheap bread meant of course the abolition of the Corn 
 Laws, for these laws were constructed on the principle that it was necessary 
 to keep bread dear. A meeting was held in Manchester to consider 
 measures necessary to be adopted for bringing about the complete repeal 
 of these Laws. The Manchester Chamber of Commerce adopted a petition 
 to Parliament against the Corn Laws. The Anti-Corn Law agitation had 
 been fairly launched. 
 
 From that time it grew and grew in importance and strength. Meet- 
 ings were held in various towns of England and Scotland. Associations 
 were formed everywhere to co-operate with the movement which had its 
 headquarters in Manchester. In NewalPs Buildings, Market Street, Man- 
 chester, the work of the League was really done for years. The leaders 
 of the movement gave up their time day by day to its service. The 
 League had to encounter a great deal of rather fierce opposition from the 
 Chartists, who loudly proclaimed that the whole movement was only 
 meant to entrap them once more into an alliance with the middle classes 
 and the employers, as in the case of the Reform Bill, in order that when 
 they had been made the cat's-paw again they might again be thrown con- 
 temptuously aside. On the other hand, the League had from the first the 
 cordial co-operation of Daniel O'Connell, who became one of their princi- 
 pal orators when they held meetings in the metropolis. They issued pam- 
 phlets by hundreds of thousands, and sent lecturers all over the country 
 explaining the principles of Free Trade. A gigantic propaganda of Free 
 Trade opinions was called into existence. Money was raised by the hold- 
 ing of bazaars in Manchester and in London, and by calling for subscrip- 
 tions. A bazaar in Manchester brought in ten thousand pounds ; one in 
 London raised rather more than double that sum, not including the sub- 
 scriptions that were contributed. A Free Trade Hall was built in Man- 
 chester. This building had an interesting history full of good omen for 
 the cause. The ground on which the hall Avas erected was the property 
 of Mr. Cobden, and was placed by him at the disposal of the League. 
 That ground was the scene of what was known in Manchester as the 
 Massacre of Peterloo. On August 10, 1819, a meeting of Manchester 
 Reformers was held on that spot, which was dispersed by an attack of 
 woldiers and militia, with the loss "f many lives. The memory of that
 
 183ft. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 179 
 
 day rankled in the hearts of the Manchester Liberals for long after, and 
 perhaps no better means could be found for purifying the ground from the 
 stain and the shame of such bloodshed than its dedication by the modern 
 apostle of peace and Free Trade as a site whereon to build a hall sacred to 
 the promulgation of his favourite doctrines. 
 
 The times were peculiarly favourable to the. new sort of propaganda 
 which came into being with the Anti-Corn Law League. A few years 
 before such an agitation would hardly have found the means of making its 
 influence felt all over the country. The very reduction of the cost of 
 postage alone must have facilitated its labours to an extent beyond calcu- 
 lation. The inundation of the country with pamphlets, tracts, and reports 
 of speeches would have been scarcely possible under the old system, and 
 would in any case have swallowed up a far larger amount of money than 
 even the League with its ample resources would have been able to supply. 
 In all parts of the country railways were being opened, and these enabled 
 the lecturers of the League to hasten from town to town and to keep the 
 cause always alive in the popular mind. All these advantages and many 
 others might, however, have proved of little avail if the League had not 
 from the first been in the hands of men who seemed as if they came by 
 special appointment to do its work. Great as the work was which the 
 League did, it will be remembered in England almost as much because of 
 the men who won the success as on account of the success itself. 
 
 The nominal leader of the Free Trade party in Parliament was foi 
 many years Mr. Charles Villiers, a man of aristocratic family and sur- 
 roundings, of remarkable ability, and of the steadiest fidelity to the cause 
 he had undertaken. Nothing is a more familiar phenomenon in the history 
 of English political agitation than the aristocrat who assumes the popular 
 cause and cries out for the ' rights ' of the ' unenfranchised millions.' But 
 it was something new to find a man of Mr. Villiers' class devoting himself 
 to a cause so entirely practical and business-like as that of the repeal of 
 the Corn Laws. Mr. Villiers brought forward for several successive sessions 
 in the House of Commons a motion in favour of the total repeal of the 
 Corn Laws. His eloquence and his argumentative power served the creat 
 purpose of drawing the attention of the country to the whole question, 
 and making converts to the principle he advocated. The House of Com- 
 mons has always of late years been the best platform from which to address 
 the country. In political agitation it has thus been made to prepare the 
 way for the schemes of legislation which it has itself always begun by 
 reprobating. But Mr. Villiers might have gone on for all his life dividing 
 the House of Commons on the question of Free Trade, without getting 
 much nearer to his object, if it were not for the manner in which the 
 
 N 2
 
 180 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cu. XTV. 
 
 cause was taken up by the country, and more particularly by the great 
 manufacturing towns of the North. Until the passing of Lord Grey's 
 Reform Bill these towns had 110 representation in Parliament. They 
 seemed destined after that event to make up for their long exclusion from 
 representative influence by taking the government of the country into 
 their own hands. Of late years they have lost some of their relative in- 
 fluence. They have not now all the power that for no inconsiderable time 
 they undoubtedly possessed. The reforms they chiefly aimed at have been 
 carried, and the spirit which in times of stress and struggle kept their 
 populations almost of one mind has less necessity of existence now. Man- 
 chester, Birmingham, and Leeds are no whit less important to the life of 
 the nation now than they were before Free Trade. But their supremacy 
 does not exist now as it did then. At that time it was town against 
 country ; Manchester representing the town, and the whole Conservative 
 (at one period almost the whole landowning) body representing the 
 country. The Manchester school, as it was called, then and for long after 
 had some teachers and leaders who were of themselves capable of making 
 any school powerful and respected. With the Manchester school began a 
 new kind of popular agitation. Up to that time agitation meant appeal to 
 passion, and lived by provoking passion. Its cause might be good or bad, 
 but the way of promoting it was the same. The Manchester school intro- 
 duced the agitation which appealed to reason and argument only ; which 
 stirred men's hearts with figures of arithmetic, rather than figures of speech, 
 and which converted mob meetings to political economy. 
 
 The real leader of the movement was Mr. Richard Cobden,. Mr. 
 Cobden was a man belonging to the yeoman class. He had received but 
 a moderate education. His father dying while the great Free Trader was 
 still young, Richard Cobden Avas taken in charge by an uncle, who had a 
 wholesale warehouse in the City of London, and who gave him employ- 
 ment there. Cobden afterwards became a partner in a Manchester printed 
 cotton factory ; and he travelled occasionally on the commercial business 
 of this establishment. He had a great liking for travel; but not by any 
 means as the ordinary tourist travels ; the interest of Cobden was not in 
 scenery, or in art, or in ruins, but in men. He studied the condition of 
 countries with a view to the manner in which it affected the men and 
 women of the present, and through them was likely to affect the future. 
 On everything that he saw he turned a quick and intelligent eye ; and he 
 saw for himself and thought for himself. Wherever he went he wanted 
 to learn something. He had in abundance that peculiar faculty which 
 ""me great men of widely different stamp to him and from each other 
 have possessed; of which Gruthe frankly boasted, and which Mint beau
 
 k84l-G. A HISTORY OF OtlR OWN TI.MKS. 181 
 
 hud mor-j largely than he was always willing to acknowledge : the faculty 
 which exacts 1'roin everyone with whom its owner comes into contact some 
 contribution to his stock of information and to his advantage;. Cobden 
 could learn something from everybody. It is doubtful whether he ever 
 came even into momentary acquaintance with anyone whom he did not 
 compel to yield him something in the way of information. He travelled 
 very widely lor a time when travelling was more difficult work than it in 
 at present. He made himself familiar with most of the countries of 
 Europe, with many parts of the East, and, what was then a rarer accom- 
 plishment, with the United States and Canada. He did not make the 
 iamiliar grand tour and then dismiss the; places he had seen from his active 
 memory. lie studied them and visited many of them again to compare 
 early with later impressions. This was in itself an education of the 
 highest value for the career he proposed to pursue. When he was about 
 thirtv veais of age he began to acquire a certain reputation as the author 
 of pamphlets directed against some of the pet doctrines of old-fashioned 
 statesmanship: the balance of power in Europe; the necessity of main- 
 taining a State Church in Ireland ; the importance of allowing no Euro- 
 pean quarrel to go on without England's intervention ; and similar 
 dogmas. Mr. Cobden's opinions then were very much as they continued 
 to the day of his death. He seemed to have come to the maturity of his 
 convictions all at once, and to have passed through no further change 
 either of growth or of decay. But whatever might be said then or now 
 of ti-e doctrines he maintained, there could be only one opinion as to the 
 skill and force which upheld them with pen as well as tongue. The 
 tongue, however, was his best weapon. If oratory were a business and 
 not an art that is, if its test were its success rather than its form then 
 it might be contended reasonably enough that Mr. Cobden was one of the 
 greatest orators England lias ever known. Nothing could exceed the per- 
 suasiveness of his style. His manner was simple, sweet and earnest. It 
 was persuasive, but it had not the sort of persuasiveness which is merely 
 a better kind of plausibility. It persuaded by convincing. It was trans- 
 parently sincere. The light of its convictions shone all through it. In 
 aimed at the reason and the judgment of the listener, and seemed to be 
 convincing him to his own interest against his prejudices. Cobden's 
 style was almost exclusively conversational, but he had a clear, well-toned 
 voice, with a quiet unassuming power in it which enabled him to make his 
 words heard distinctly and without effort all through the great meetings 
 he had often to address. His speeches were full of variety. Tic illus- 
 trated every argument by something drawn from his personal observation 
 or from reading, and his illustrations were always striking, appropriate.
 
 182 A HISTORY OT< OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xiv. 
 
 and interesting. He had a large amount of bright and winning humour, 
 and he spoke the simplest and purest English. He never used an unneces- 
 sary sentence or failed for a single moment in making his meaning clear. 
 Many strong opponents of Mr. Cobden's opinions confessed even during 
 his lifetime that they sometimes found with dismay their most cherished 
 convictions crumbling away beneath his flow of easy argument. In the 
 fctormy times of national passion Mr. Cobden was less powerful. When 
 the question was one to be settled by the rules that govern man's substan- 
 tial interests, or even by the standing rules, if such an expression may be 
 allowed, of morality, then Cobden was unequalled. So long as the con- 
 troversy could be settled after this fashion ' I will show you that in such 
 a course you are acting injuriously to your own interests ; ' or ' You are 
 doing what a fair and just man ought not to do ' so long as argument of 
 that kind could sway the conduct of men, then there was no one who could 
 convince as Cobden could. But when the hour and mood of passion came, 
 and a man or a nation said, ' I do not care any longer whether this is for 
 my interest or not I don't care whether you call it right or wrong 
 this way my instincts drive me, and this way I am going' then Mr. 
 Cobden's teaching, the very perfection as it was of common sense and fair 
 play, was out of season. It could not answer feeling with feeling. It 
 was not able to ' overcrow,' in the word of Shakespeare and Spenser, one 
 emotion by another. The defect of Mr. Cobden's style of mind and 
 temper is fitly illustrated in the deficiency of his method of argument. 
 His sort of education, his modes of observation, his way of turning travel 
 to account, all went together to make him the man he was. The apostle 
 of common sense and fair dealing, he had no sympathy with the passions 
 of men ; he did not understand them; they passed for nothing in his cal- 
 culations. His judgment of men and of nations was based far too much 
 on his knowledge of his own motives and character. lie knew that in any 
 given case he could always trust himself to act the part of a just and pru- 
 dent man ; and he assumed that all the world could be governed by the 
 rules of prudence and of equity. History had little interest for him, except 
 us it testified to man's advancement and steady progress, and furnished 
 arguments to show that men prospered by liberty, peace and just dealings 
 with their neighbours. He cared little or nothing for mere sentiments. 
 Even where these had their root in some human tendency that was noble 
 in itself, he did not reverence them if they seemed to stand in the way of 
 men's acting peacefully ami prudently. He did not see why the mere 
 idea of nationality, fur example, should induce people to disturb them 
 selves by insurrections and wars, so long as they were tolerably well 
 governed, and allowed to exist in peace and to make an honest living.
 
 1841-6. A HISTORY OI' OUli OWN TIMES. 183 
 
 Thus he never represented more than half the English character, lie was 
 always out of sympathy with his countrymen on some great political 
 question. 
 
 But he seemed as if he were designed by nature to conduct to success 
 such an agitation as that against the Corn Laws. He found some 
 colleagues who were worthy of him. His chief companion in the cam- 
 paign was Mi. Bright. Mr. Bright's fame is not so completely bound up 
 with the repeal of the Corn Laws, or even with the extension of the 
 suffrage, as that of Mr. Cobden. If Mr. Bright had been on the wrong 
 side of every cause he pleaded ; if his agitation had been as conspicuous 
 for failure as it was for success, he would still be famous among English 
 public men. He was what Mr. Cobden was not, an orator of the very 
 highest class. It is doubtful whether English public life has ever pro- 
 duced a man who possessed more of the qualifications of a great orator 
 than Mr. Bright. He had a commanding presence ; not indeed the stately 
 and colossal form of O'Connell, but a massive figure, a large head, a hand- 
 some and expressive face. His voice was powerful, resonant, clear, with 
 a peculiar vibration in it which lent unspeakable effect to any passages of 
 pathos or of scorn. His style of speaking was exactly what a conventional 
 demagogue's ought not to be. It was pure to austerity ; it was stripped 
 of all superfluous ornament. It never gushed or foamed. It never 
 allowed itself to be mastered by passion. The first peculiarity that struck 
 the listener was its superb self-restraint. The orator at his most powerful 
 passages appeared as if he were rather keeping in his strength than taxing 
 it with effort. His voice was for the most part calm and measured ; he 
 hardly ever indulged in much gesticulation. He never under the pressure 
 of whatever emotion shouted or stormed. The fire of his eloquence was a 
 white heat ; intense, consuming, but never sparkling or sputtering. He 
 had an admirable gift of humour and a keen ironical power. He had 
 read few books, but of those he read he was a master. The English 
 Bible and Milton were his chief studies. His style was probably formed 
 for the most part on the Bible ; for although he may have moulded his 
 general way of thinking and his simple strong morality on the lessons he 
 found in Milton, his mere language bore little trace of Milton's stately 
 classicism, with its Hellenized and Latinized terminology, but was above 
 all things Saxon and simple. Bright was a man of the middle class. His 
 family were Quakers of a somewhat austere mould. They were manu- 
 facturers of carpets in Rochdale, Lancashire, and had made considerable 
 money in their business. John Bright therefore was raised above the 
 temptations which often beset the eloquent young man who takes up a 
 democratic cause in a country like ours ; and as our public opinion goes
 
 184 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. V,Y 
 
 it probably was to his advantage when first he made his appearance in 
 Parliament that lie was well known to be a man oi' some means, and not a 
 clever and needy adventurer. 
 
 Mr. Bright himself has given an interesting account of his first meeting 
 with Mr. Cobden : 
 
 ' The first time I became acquainted with Mr. Cobden was in con- 
 nection with the great question of education. 1 went over to Manchester 
 to call upon him and invite him to come to Kochdale to speak at a meeting 
 about to be held in the school-room of the Baptist Chapel in West Street. 
 I found him in his counting-house. I told him what I wanted ; his 
 countenance lighted up with pleasure to find that others were working in 
 the same cause. He without hesitation agreed to come. He came and he 
 spoke ; and though he was then so young a speaker, yet the qualities of 
 his speech were such as remained with him so long as he was able to speak 
 at all clearness, logic, a convei>ational eloquence, a persuasiveness which 
 when combined with the absolute truth there was in his eye and in his 
 countenance, became a power it was almost impossible to resist.' 
 
 Still more remarkable is the description Mr. Bright lias given of 
 Cobden's first appeal to him to join in the agitation for the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws : 
 
 ' I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in 
 the depths of grief I may almost say of despair, for the light and sun- 
 shine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of 
 my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and a too brief happi- 
 ness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called 
 on me as his friend, and addressed me, as you may suppose, with words of 
 condolence. After a time he looked up and said : ' There are thousands 
 and thousands of homes in England at this moment where wives and 
 mothers and children are dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm 
 of your grief is passed, I would advise you to come with me, and we will 
 never rest until the Corn Laws arc; repealed.' 
 
 The invitation thus given was cordially accepted, and from that time 
 dates the almost unique fellowship of these two men; who worked together 
 in the closest brotherhood, who loved each other as not all brothers do, 
 who were associated so closely in the public mind that until Cobden's 
 death the name of one was scarcely ever mentioned without that of the 
 other. There was something positively romantic about their mutual 
 attachment. Each led a noble life ; each was in his own way a man of 
 genius ; each was simple and strong. Rivalry between them would have 
 been impossible, although they were every day being compared and con- 
 trasted by both friendly and unfriendly critics. Their gifts were admir-
 
 1811-6. A HIHTOliV OF OUR OWN TIMES. 1H5 
 
 ably suited to make t.'icni powerful allies. Each had something that the 
 other wanted. Bright had not Cobden's winning persuasiveness nor hia 
 surprising enec and force of argument. But Cobdcn had not anything 
 like his companion's oratorical power. lie had not the tones of scorn, of 
 pathos, of humour, and of passion. The two together made a genuine 
 power in the House of Commons and on the platform. Mr. Kinglake, 
 who is as little in sympathy with the general political opinions of Cobdcn 
 and Bright as any man well could be, has borne admirable testimony to 
 their argumentative power and to their influence over the IIou.se of 
 Commons: 'These two orators had shown with what a strength, with 
 what a masterly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage they 
 could carry a scientific truth through the storms of politics. They had 
 shown that they could arouse and govern the assenting thousands who 
 listened to them with delight that they could bend the House of Commons 
 - that they could press their creed upon a Prime Minister, and put upon 
 his mind so hard a stress, that after a while he felt it to be a torture and 
 a violence to his reason to have to make a stand against them. Nay, 
 more. Each of these gifted men had proved that he could go bravely 
 into the midst of angry opponents, could show them their fallacies one by 
 one, destroy their favourite theories before their very faces, and triumph- 
 antly argue them down.' It was indeed a scientific truth which in the 
 first instance Cobden and Bright undertook to force upon the recognition 
 of a Parliament composed in great measure of the very men who were 
 taught to believe that their own personal and class interests were bound 
 up with the maintenance of the existing economical creed. Those who 
 hold that because it was a scientific truth the task of its advocates ought 
 to have been easy, will do well to observe the success of the resistance 
 which has been thus far offered to it in almost every country but England 
 alone. 
 
 These men had many assistants and lieutenants well worthy to act 
 with them and under them. Mr. W. J. Fox, for instance, a Unitarian 
 minister of great popularity and remarkable eloquence, seemed at one 
 time almost to divide public admiration as an orator with Mr. Cobden and 
 Mr. Bright. Mr. Milncr Gibson, who had been a Tory, went over to the 
 movement, and gave it the assistance of trained Parliamentary knowledge 
 and very considerable debating skill. In the Lancashire towns the League 
 had the advantage of being officered for the most part by shrewd and 
 sound men of business, who gave their time as freely as they gave their 
 money to the advancement of the cause. It is curious to compare the 
 manner in which the Anti-Corn Law agitation was conducted with the 
 manner in which the contemporary agitation in Ireland for Repeal of the
 
 186 A HISTORY 01-' OUK OWN TIMES. en. xw 
 
 Union was carried on. In England the agitation was based on the most 
 strictly business principles. The leaders spoke and acted as if the League 
 itself were some great commercial firm, which was bound above all things 
 to fulfil its promises and keep to the letter as well as the spirit of its 
 engagements. There was no boasting ; there was no exaggeration ; there 
 were no appeals to passion ; no romantic rousings of sentimental emotion. 
 The system of the agitation was as clear, straightforward and business-like 
 as its purpose. In Ireland there were monster meetings with all manner 
 of dramatic and theatric effects ; with rhetorical exaggeration and vehe- 
 ment appeal to passion and to ancient memory of suffering. The cause 
 was kept up from day to day by assurances of near success so positive that 
 it is sometimes hard to believe those who made them could themselves 
 have been deceived by them. No doubt the difference will be described 
 by many as the mere result of the difference between the one cause and 
 the other ; between the agitation for Free Trade, clear, tangible and 
 practical, and that for Repeal of the Union with its shadowy object and 
 its visionary impulses. But a better explanation of the difference will be 
 found in the different natures to which an appeal had to be made. It is 
 not by any means certain that O'Connell's cause was a mere shadow ; nor 
 will it appear, if we study the criticism of the time, that the guides of 
 public opinion who pronounced the Repeal agitation absurd and ludicrous 
 had any better words at first for the movement against the Corn Laws. 
 Cobden and Bright on the one side, O'Connell on the other, knew the 
 audiences they had to address. It would have been impossible to stir the 
 blood of the Lancashire artisan by means of the appeals which went to 
 'he very heart of the dreamy, sentimental impassioned Celt of the South 
 of Ireland. The Munster peasant would have understood little of such 
 clear, penetrating business-like argument as that by which Cobden and 
 Bright enforced their doctrines. Had O'Connell's cause been as practical 
 and its success been as immediately attainable as that of the Anti-Corn 
 Law League, the great Irish agitator would still have had to address his 
 followers in a different tone of appeal. ' All men are not alike,' says the 
 Norman butler to the Flemish soldier in Scott's ' Betrothed :' ' that which 
 will but warm your Flemish hearts will put wildfire into Norman brains ; 
 and what may only encourage your countrymen to man the walls, will 
 make ours fly over the battlements.' The most impassioned Celt, however, 
 will admit that in the Anti-Corn Law movement of Cobden and Bright, 
 with its rigid truthfulness and its strict proportion between cn])acity and 
 promise, there was an entirely new dignity lent to popular agitation which 
 raised it to the condition of statesmanship in the rough. The relbrm 
 Hgitation in Enjrland had not been conducted without some exaggeration,
 
 1841-6. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. L&J 
 
 much appeal to passion, and some not by any means indistinct alUrsion to 
 the reserve of popular force which might be called into action if legislators 
 and peers proved insensible to argument. The era of the Anti-Corn Law 
 movement was a new epoch altogether in English political controversy. 
 
 The League, however, successful as it might be throughout the country, 
 had its great work to do in Parliament. The Free Trade leaders must 
 have found their hearts sink within them when they came sometimes to 
 confront that fortress of traditions and of vested rights. Even after the 
 change made in favour of manufacturing and middle class interests by the 
 Reform Bill, the House of Commons was still composed, as to nine-tenths 
 of its whole number, by representatives of the landlords. The entire 
 House of Lords was then constituted of the owners of land. All 
 tradition, all prestige, all the dignity of aristocratic institutions, seemed to 
 be naturally arrayed against the new movement, conducted as it was by 
 manufacturers and traders for the benefit seemingly of trade and those 
 whom it employed. The artisan population who might have been formid- 
 able as a disturbing elment were, on the whole, rather against the Free 
 Traders than for them. Nearly all the great official leaders had to be 
 converted to the doctrines of Free Trade. Many of the Whigs were 
 willing enough to admit the case of Free Trade as the young Scotch lady 
 mentioned by Sydney Smith admitted the case of love ' in the abstract ; ' 
 but they could not recognise the possibility of applying it in the compli- 
 cated financial conditions of an artificial system like ours. Some of the 
 Whigs were in favour of a fixed duty in place of the existing sliding 
 scale. The leaders of the movement had indeed to resist a very dangerous 
 temptation coming from statesmen who professed to be in accordance with 
 them as to the mere principle of protection, but who were always endea- 
 vouring to persuade them that they had better accept any decent compro- 
 mise and not push their demands to extremes. The witty peer who in a 
 former generation answered an advocate of moderate reform by asking 
 him what he thought of moderate chastity, might have had many oppor- 
 tunities, if he had been engaged in the Free Trade movement, of turning 
 his epigram to account. 
 
 Mr. Macaulay, for instance, wrote to the electors of Edinburgh to 
 remonstrate with them on what he considered their fanatical and uncom- 
 promising adherence to the principle of Free Trade. ' In my opinion,' 
 Mr. Macaulay wrote to his constituents, ' you are all wrong not l>o ause 
 you think all protection bad, for I think KG too ; not even because you 
 avow your opinion and attempt to propagate it ; for I have always done 
 the same, and shall do the same : but because, being in a situation where 
 your only hope is in a compromise, you refuse to hear of compromise ;
 
 188 A HISTORY 0V OUR OWN TIMES. cii. xiv. 
 
 because, being in a situation where every person who will go a step with 
 you on the right road ought to be cordially welcomed, you drive from you 
 chose who are willing and desirous to go with you half way. To this 
 policy I will be no party. I will not abandon those with whom I have 
 hitherto acted, and without whose help I am confident that no great 
 improvement can be effected, for an object purely selfish.' It had not 
 occurred to Mr. Macaulay that any party but the Whigs could bring in 
 any measure of iiscal or other reform worth the having; and indeed he 
 probably thought it would be something like an act of ingratitude 
 amounting to a species of sacrilege to accept reform from any hands but 
 those of its recognised Whig patrons. The Anti-Corn Law agitation 
 introduced a game of politics into England which astonished and consider- 
 ably discomfited steady-going politicians like Macaulay. The League men 
 did not profess to be bound by any indefeasible bond of allegiance to the 
 Whig party. They were prepared to co-operate with any party whatever 
 which would undertake to abolish the Corn-Laws. Their agitation would 
 have done some good in this way, if in no other sense. It introduced a 
 more robust and independent spirit into political life. It is almost ludi- 
 crous sometimes to read the diatribes of supporters of Lord Melbourne's 
 Government, for example, against anyone who should presume to think 
 that any object in the mind of a true patriot, or at least of a true Liberal, 
 could equal in importance that of keeping the Melbourne Ministry in 
 power. Great reforms have been made by Conservative Governments in 
 our own days, because the new political temper which was growing up 
 in England refused to affirm that the patent of reform rested in the pos- 
 session of any particular party, and that if the holders of the monopoly 
 did not find it convenient, or were not in the humour, to use it any 
 further just then, no one else must venture to interfere in the matter, or 
 to undertake the duty which they had declined to perform. At the time 
 that Macaulay wrote his letter, however, it had not entered into the mind 
 of any Whig to believe it possible that the repeal of the Corn Laws was 
 to be the work of a great Conservative minister, done at the bidding of 
 two Radical politicians. 
 
 It is a significant fact that the Anti-Corn Law League were not in the 
 least discouraged by the accession of Sir Robert Peel to power. To them 
 the fixed duty proposed by Lord John Russell was as objectionable as 
 Peel's sliding scale. Their hopes seem rather to have gone up than gone 
 down when the minister came into power whose adherents, unlike those 
 of Lord John Russell, v. r er<; absolutely against the very principle of Free 
 Trade. It is of some importance in estimating the morality of the course 
 pursued by Peel to observe the opinion formed of his professions and his
 
 1811-6. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 189 
 
 probable purposes by the shrewd men who led the Anti-Corn Law League. 
 The grand charge against Peel is that he betrayed his party; that he 
 induced them to continue their allegiance to him on the promise that he 
 would never concede the principle of Free Trade ; and that he used his 
 power to establish Free Trade when the time came to choose between it 
 and a surrender of oflice. Now it is certain that the League always 
 regarded Sir Robert Peel as a Free Trader in heart ; as one who fully 
 admitted the principle of Free Trade, but who did not see his way just 
 then to deprive the agricultural interest of the protection on which, they 
 had for so many years been allowed and encouraged to lean. In the 
 debate after the general election of 1841, the debate which turned out 
 the Melbourne Ministry, Mr. Cobden, then for the first time a member of 
 the House of Commons, said : ' I am a Free Trader ; I call myself neither 
 Whig nor Tory. I am proud to acknowledge the virtue of the Whig 
 Ministry in coming out from the ranks of the monopolists and advancing 
 three parts out of four in my own direction. Yet if the right honourable 
 baronet opposite (Sir R. Peel) advances one step further, I will be the first 
 to meet him half way, and shake hands with him.' Some years later 
 Mr. Cobden said at Birmingham, ' There can be no doubt that Sir Robert 
 Peel is, at heart, as good a Free Trader as I am. He has told us so in the 
 House of Commons again and again ; nor do I doubt that Sir Robert Peel 
 has in his inmost heart the desire to be the man who shall carry out the 
 principles of Free Trade in this country.' Sir Robert Peel had indeed, 
 as Mr. Cobden said, again and again in Parliament expressed his convic- 
 tion as to the general truth of the principles of Free Trade. In 1842, he 
 declared it to be utterly beyond the power of Parliament, and a mere 
 delusion, to say that by any duty, fixed or otherwise, a certain price could 
 be guaranteed to the producer. In the same year he expressed his belief 
 that, ' on the general principle of Free Trade there is now no great 
 difference of opinion, and that all agree in the general rule that we should 
 buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.' This expression of 
 opinion called forth an ironical cheer from the benches of opposition. 
 Peel knew well what the cheer was meant to convey. He knew it meant 
 to ask him why then he did not allow the country to buy its grain in the 
 cheapest market. He promptly added 'I know the meaning of that 
 cheer. I do not wish to raise a discussion on the Corn Laws or the Sugar 
 Duties, which 1 contend, however, are exceptions to the general rule, and 
 I will not go into that question now.' The press of the day, whether for 
 or against Peel, commented upon his declarations and his measures as 
 indicating clearly that the bent of his mind was towards (Vr-o trade even 
 in strain. At all events, he had reached that mental condition when he
 
 190 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xiv 
 
 regarded the case of grain, like that of sugar, as a necessary exception for 
 the time to the operation of a general rule. 
 
 It ought to have been obvious that if exceptional circumstances should 
 arise, pulling more strongly in the direction of the League, Sir Robert 
 Peel's own explicit declarations must bind him to recognise the necessity 
 of applying the Free Trade principles even to corn. ' Sir Robert Peel,' 
 says his cousin Sir Laurence Peel, in a sketch of the life and character ol 
 the great statesman, ' had been, as I have said, always a Free Trader. The 
 questions to which he had declined to apply those principles had been 
 viewed by him as exceptional. The Corn Law had been so treated by 
 many able exponents of the principles of Free Trade.' Sir Robert Peel 
 himself has left it on record that during the discussions on the Corn Law 
 of 1842 he was more than once pressed to give a guarantee, ' so far as a 
 minister could give it,' that the amount of protection established by that 
 law should be permanently adhered to ; ' but although I did not then con- 
 template the necessity for further change, I uniformly refused to fetter 
 the discretion of the Government by any such assurances as those that 
 were required of me.' It is evident that the condition of Sir Robert Peel's 
 opinions was even as far back as 1842 something very different indeed 
 from that of the ordinary county member or pledged Protectionist, and 
 that Peel had done all he could to make this clear to his party. A minister 
 who in 1842 refused to fetter the discretion of his Government in dealing 
 with the protection of home-grown grain ought not on the face of things 
 to be accused of violating his pledges and betraying his party, if four years 
 later, under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances, he made up his 
 mind to the abolition of such a protection. Let us test this in a manner 
 that will be familiar to our own time. Suppose a Prime Minister is pressed 
 by some of his own party to give the House of Commons a guarantee, ' so 
 far as a minister could give it,' that the principle of the State Church 
 Establishment in England shall be permanently adhered to. He declines 
 to fetter the discretion of the Government in the future. Is it not evident 
 that such an answer would be taken by nine out of ten of his listeners to 
 be ominous of some change to the Established Church ? If four years 
 after the same minister were to propose to disestablish the Church, he 
 might be denounced and he might even be execrated, but no one could 
 fairly accuse him of having violated his pledge and betrayed his party. 
 
 The country party, however, did not understand Sir Robert Peel as 
 their opponents and his assuredly imderstood him. They did not at this 
 time believe in the possibility of any change. Free Trade was to them little 
 more than an abstraction. They did not much care who preached it out of 
 Parliament. They were convinced that the state of things they saw around
 
 1811- fi. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 191 
 
 them when they were boys would continue to the end. They looked on Mr. 
 Villiers and his annual motion in favour of Free Trade very much as a stout 
 old Tory of later times might regard the annual motion for woman suffrage. 
 Both parties in the House that is to say, both of the parties from whom 
 ministers were taken alike set themselves against the introduction of any 
 p.uch measure. The supporters of it were, with one exception, not men of 
 family and rank. It was agitated for a good deal out of doors, but agita- 
 tion had not up to that time succeeded in making much way even with a 
 reformed Parliament. The country party observed that some men among 
 the two leading sets went farther in favour of the abstract principle than 
 others; but it did not seem to them that that really affected the practical 
 question very much. In 1842, Mr. Disraeli himself was one of those who 
 stood up for the Free Trade principle, and insisted that it had been rather 
 the inherited principle of the Conservatives than of the Whigs. Country 
 gentlemen did not therefore greatly concern themselves about the practical 
 work doing in Manchester, or the professions of abstract opinion so often 
 made in Parliament. They did not see that the mind of their leader was 
 avowedly in a progressive condition on the subject of Free Trade. Because 
 they could not bring themselves to question for a moment the principle of 
 protection for home-grown grain, they made up their minds that it was a 
 principle as sacred with him. Against that conviction no evidence could 
 prevail. It was with them a point of conscience and honour ; it would 
 have seemed an insult to their leader to believe even his own words if 
 these seemed to say that it was a mere question of expediency, convenience, 
 and time with him. 
 
 Perhaps it would have been better if Sir Robert Peel had devoted 
 himself more directly to what Mr. Disraeli afterwards called educating 
 his party. Perhaps, if he had made it part of his duty as a leader tc 
 prepare the minds of his followers for the fact that protection for 
 grain having ceased to be tenable as an economic principle would 
 possibly some day have to be given up as a practice, he might have 
 taken his party along with him. He might have been able to show 
 them, as the events have shown them since, that the introduction of 
 free corn would be a blessing to the population of England in general, 
 and would do nothing but good for the landed interest as well. The 
 influence of Peel at that time, and indeed all through his administration 
 up to the introduction of his Free Trade measures, was limitless, so far as 
 his ptirty were concerned. He could have done anything with them. 
 Indeed, we find no evidence so clear to prove that Peel had not in 1842 
 made up his mind to the introduction of Free Trade, as the fact that ha 
 did not at once begin to educate his party to it. This is to be regretted
 
 192 A HISTORY OF OUR OWS TIMES. en. xiv. 
 
 The measure might have been passed by common accord. There is some- 
 thing not altogether without pathetic influence in the thought of that 
 country party whom Peel had led so long, and who adored him so 
 thoroughly, turning away from him and against him and mournfully 
 seeking another leader. There is something pathetic in the thought that. 
 rightly or wrongly, they should have believed themselves betrayed by their 
 chief. But Peel, to begin with, was a reserved, cold, somewhat awkward 
 man. He was not effusive; he did not pour out his emotions and reveal 
 all his changes of opinion in bursts of confidence even to his habitual 
 associates. He brooded over these things in his own mind ; he gave such 
 expression to them in open debate as any passing occasion seemed strictly 
 to call for ; and he assumed perhaps that the gradual changes operating in 
 his views when thus expressed were understood by his followers. Above 
 all, it is probable that Peel himself did not see until almost the last 
 moment that the time had actually come when the principle of protection 
 nmst give way to other and more weighty claims. In his speech announc- 
 ing his intended legislation in 1846, Sir Robert Peel, with a proud frank- 
 ness which was characteristic of him, denied that his altered course of 
 action was due exclusively to the failure of the potato crop and the dread 
 of famine in Ireland. 'I will not,' he said, 'withhold the homage whirl* 
 is due to the progress of reason a,nd of truth by denying that my opinions 
 on the subject of Protection have undergone a change. ... I will not 
 direct the course of the vessel by observations taken in 1842.' But it is 
 probable that if the Irish famine had not threatened, the moment for intro- 
 ducing the new legislation might have been indefinitely postponed. The 
 prospects of the Anti-Corn Law League did not look by any means bright 
 when the session preceding the introduction of the Free Trade Legislation 
 came to an end. The number of votes that the League could count on in 
 Parliament did not much exceed that which the advocates of Home Rule 
 have been able to reckon up in our day. Nothing in 181.';! or in the earlier 
 part of 1845 pointed to any immediate necessity for Sir Robert Peel's 
 testing the progress of his own convictions by reducing them into the 
 shape of practical action. It is therefore not hard to understand how even 
 a far-seeing and conscientious statesman, busy with the practical work of 
 each day, might have put off taking definite counsel with himself as to the 
 introduction of measures for which just then there seemed no special 
 necessity, and which could hardly be introduced without bitter contro- 
 versy.
 
 i841-6. A HISTORY OF OUli OWN TIMES. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 
 
 WE see how the two great parties of the State stood witli regard to thia 
 question of Free Trade. The Whigs were steadily gravitating towards it. 
 Their leaders did not quite see their way to accept it as a principle of 
 practical statesmanship, but it was evident that their acceptance of it was 
 only a question of time, and of no long time. The leader of the Tory 
 party was being drawn day by day more in the same direction. Botli 
 leaders, Russell and Peel, had gone so far as to admit the general principle 
 of Free Trade. Peel had contended that grain was in England a neces- 
 sary exception ; Russell was not of opinion that the time had come when 
 it could be treated otherwise than as an exception. The Free Trade party, 
 small, indeed, in its Parliamentary force, but daily growing more and 
 more powerful with the country, would take nothing from either leader 
 but Free Trade sans phrase ; and would take that from either leader with- 
 out regard to partisan considerations. It is evident to anyone who knoAVs 
 anything of the working of our system of government by party, that this 
 must soon have ended in one or other of the two great ruling parties 
 forming an alliance with the Free Traders. If unforeseen events had not 
 interposed, it is probable that conviction would first have fastened on the 
 minds of the Whigs, and that they would have had the honour of abolish- 
 in y the Corn Laws. They were out of office, and did not seem likely to 
 get back soon to it by their own power, and the Free Trade party would 
 have come in time to be a very desirable ally. It would be idle to pre- 
 tend to doubt that the convictions of political parties are hastened on a 
 good deal under our system by the yearning of those who are out of 
 office to get the better of those who are in. Statesmen in England are 
 converted as Henry of Navarre became Catholic : we do not say that they 
 actually change their opinions for the sake of making themselves eligible 
 for power, but a change which has been growing up imperceptibly, and 
 which might otherwise have taken a long time to declare itself, is stimu- 
 lated thus to confess itself and come out into the light. But in the case 
 of the Anti-Corn Law agitation, an event over which political parties had 
 no control intervened to spur the intent of the Prime Minister. Mr. 
 Bright many years after, when pronouncing the eulogy of his dead friend 
 Cobden, described what happened in a fine sentence : ' Famine itself, 
 against which we had warred, joined us.' In the autumn of 18-1-5 the 
 potato rot began in Ireland. 
 
 VOL. I. O
 
 194 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. x*. 
 
 The vast majority of the working population of Ireland were known 
 to depend absolutely on the potato for subsistence. In the northern pro- 
 vince, where the population were of Scotch extraction, the oatmeal, 
 the brose of their ancestors, still supplied the staple of their food ; but in 
 the southern and western provinces a large proportion of the peasantry 
 actually lived on the potato and the potato alone. In these districts whole 
 generations grew up, lived, married, and passed away, without having ever 
 tasted flesh meat. It was evident, then, that a failure in the potato crop 
 would be equivalent to famine. Many of the labouring class received 
 little or no money wages. They lived on what was called the ' cottier 
 tenant system ; ' that is to say, a man worked for a landowner on con- 
 dition of getting the use of a little scrap of land for himself, on which to 
 grow potatoes to be the sole food of himself and his family. The news 
 came in the autumn of 1845 that the long continuance of sunless wet 
 and cold had imperilled, if not already destroyed, tho food of a people. 
 
 The Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel held hasty meetings closely following 
 each other. People began to ask whether Parliament was about to be 
 called together, and whether the Government had resolved on a bold policy. 
 The Anti-Corn Law League were clamouring for the opening of the 
 ports. The Prime Minister himself was strongly in favour of such a 
 course. He urged upon his colleagues that all restrictions upon the im- 
 portation of foreign corn should be suspended either by an Order in 
 Council, or by calling Parliament together and recommending such a 
 measure from the throne. It is now known that in offering this advice to 
 his colleagues Peel accompanied it with the expression of a doubt as to 
 whether it would ever be possible to restore the restrictions that had once 
 been suspended. Indeed, this doubt must have filled every mind. The 
 League were openly declaring that one reason why they called for the 
 opening of the ports was that once opened they never could be closed 
 again. The doubt was enough for some of the colleagues of Sir Robert 
 Peel. It seems marvellous now, how responsible statesmen could struggle 
 for the retention of restrictions which were so unpopular and indefensible 
 that if they were once suspended, under the pressure of no matter what 
 exceptional necessity, they never could be reimposed. The Duke of 
 Wellington and Lord Stanley, however, opposed the idea of opening the 
 ports, and the proposal fell through. The Cabinet merely resolved on 
 appointing a Commission, consisting of the heads of departments in 
 Ireland, to take some steps to guard against a sudden outbreak of famine, 
 and the thought of an autumnal session was abandoned. Sir Robert Peel 
 himself has thus tersely described the manner in which his proposals 
 were received : ' The Cabinet by a very considerable majority declined
 
 1841-6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 195 
 
 giving its assent to the proposals which I thus made to them. They were 
 supported by only three members of the Cabinet, the Earl of Aberdeen, 
 Sir James Graham, and Mr. Sidney Herbert. The other members of 
 the Cabinet, some on the ground of objection to the principle of the 
 measures recommended, others upon the ground that there was not yet 
 sufficient evidence of the necessity for them, withheld their sanction.' 
 
 The great cry all through Ireland was for the opening of the ports. 
 The Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin issued a series of reso- 
 lutions declaring their conviction from the most undeniable evidence that 
 considerably more than one third of the entire potato crop in Ireland had 
 been already destroyed by the disease, and that the disease had not ceased 
 its ravages, but on the contrary was daily expanding more and more. 
 ' No reasonable conjecture can be formed,' the resolutions went on to state, 
 ' with respect to the limit of its effects short of the destruction of the 
 entire remaining crop ; ' and the document concluded with a denuncia- 
 tion of the Ministry for not opening the ports, or calling Parliament 
 together before the usual time for its assembling. 
 
 Two or three days after the issue of these resolutions Lord John 
 Russell wrote a letter from Edinburgh to his constituents, the electors of 
 the City of London a letter which is one of the historical documents of 
 the reign. It announced his unqualified conversion to the principles of 
 the Anti-Corn Law League. The failure of the potato crop was of course 
 the immediate occasion of this letter. ' Indecision and procrastination,' 
 Lord John Russell wrote, ' may produce a state of suffering which it is 
 frightful to contemplate. . . . It is no longer worth while to contend for 
 a fixed duty. In 1841 the Free Trade party would have agreed to a duty 
 of Ss. per quarter on wheat, and after a lapse of years this duty might 
 have been further reduced, and ultimately abolished. But the impositior 
 of any duty at present, without a provision for its extinction within t. 
 short period, would but prolong a contest already sufficiently fruitful of 
 animosity and discontent.' Lord John Russell then invited a general 
 understanding, to put an end to a system ' which has been proved to be 
 the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter 
 division among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality and crime 
 among the people.' Then the writer added a significant remark to the 
 effect that the Government appeared to be waiting for some excuse to 
 give up the present Corn Laws, and urging the people to afford them all 
 the excuse they could desire, ' by petition, by address, by remonstrance.' 
 
 Peel himself has told us in his Memoirs what was the effect which this 
 letter produced upon his own councils. It ' could not,' he points out, ' fail 
 to exercise a very material influence on the public mind, and on the
 
 1 ( J6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xv 
 
 subject- mutter of our deliberations in the Cabinet. It justified the con- 
 clusion that the Whig party was prepared to unite with the Anti-Corn 
 Law League in demanding the total repeal of the Corn Laws.' Peel 
 would not consent now to propose simply an opening of the ports. It 
 rf-ould seem, he thought, a mere submission, to accept the minimum of 
 the terms ordered by the Whig leader. That would have been well enough 
 when he first recommended it to his Cabinet ; and if it could then have 
 been offered to the country as the spontaneous movement of a united 
 Ministry, it would have been becoming of the emergency and of the men. 
 But to do this now would be futile ; would seem like trifling with the 
 question. Sir Robert Peel therefore recommended to his Cabinet an early 
 meeting of Parliament with the view of bringing forward some measure 
 equivalent to a speedy Repeal of the -Corn Laws. 
 
 The recommendation was wise. It was, indeed, indispensable. Yet it 
 is hard to think that an impartial posterity will form a very lofty estimate 
 of the wisdom with which the counsels of the two great English parties 
 were guided in this momentous emergency. Neither Whigs nor Tories 
 appear to have formed a judgment because of facts or principles, but only 
 in deference to the political necessities of the hour. Sir Robert Peel him- 
 self denied that it was the resistless hand of famine in Ireland which had 
 brought him to his resolve that the Corn Laws ought to be abolished. He 
 grew into the conviction that they were bad in principle. Lord John 
 Russell had long been growing into the same conviction. Yet the League 
 had been left to divide with but small numbers against overwhelming 
 majorities made up of both parties, until the very session before Peel 
 proposed to repeal the Corn Laws. Lord Beaconsfield, indeed, indulges 
 in something like exaggeration when he says, in his ' Life of Lord George 
 Bentinck,' that the close of the session of 1845 found the League nearly 
 reduced to silence. But it is not untrue that, as he says, ' the Manchester 
 confederates seemed to be least in favour with Parliament and the country 
 on the very eve of their triumph.' ' They lost at the same time elections 
 and the ear of the House ; and the cause of total and immediate repeal 
 seemed in a not less hopeless position than when, under circumstances of 
 infinite difficulty, it was first and solely upheld by the terse eloquence and 
 vivid perception of Charles Villiers.' Lord Beaconsfield certainly ought to 
 know what cause had and what had not the ear of the House of Commons 
 at that time ; and yet we venture to doubt, even after his assurance, 
 whether the League and its speakers had in any way found their hold on 
 the attention of Parliament diminishing. But the loss of elections \s 
 bevond dispute It is a fact alluded to in the very letter from Lord John 
 Russell which was creating so much commotion. ' It is not to be denied,'
 
 1841-6. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 197 
 
 Lord John RusHcll writes, ' that many elections for cities and towns in 
 1811, and some in 1815, appear to favour the assertion that Free Trade is 
 tiot popular with the great mass of the community.' This is, from whatever 
 cause, a very common phenomenon in our political history. A movement 
 which began with the promise of sweeping all before it seems after a while 
 to lose its force, and is supposed by many observers to be now only the work 
 and the care of a few earnest and fanatical men. Suddenly it is taken up 
 by a minister of commanding influence, and the bore or the crotchet of 
 one Parliament is the great party controversy of a second, and the accom- 
 plished triumph of a third. In this instance it is beyond dispute that the 
 League seemed to be somewhat losing in strength and influence just on 
 the eve of its complete triumph. He must, indeed, be the very optimist of 
 Parliamentary government who upholds the manner of Free Trade's final 
 adoption as absolutely satisfactory, and as reflecting nothing but credit 
 upon the counsels of our two great political parties. Such a well-contented 
 personage might be fairly asked to explain why a system of protective 
 taxation, beginning to be regarded by all thoughtful statesmen as bad in 
 itself, should never be examined with a view to its repeal until the force 
 of a great emergency and the rival biddings of party leaders came to render 
 its repeal inevitable. The Corn Laws, as all the world now admits, were 
 a cruel burden to the poor and the working class of England. They were 
 justly described by Lord John Russell as ' the blight of commerce, the 
 bane of agriculture, the source of bitter division among classes ; the cause 
 of penury, fever, mortality and crime among the people.' All this was 
 independent of the sudden and ephemeral calamity of the potato rot, which 
 at the time when Lord John Russell wrote that letter did not threaten to 
 become nearly so fatal as it afterwards proved to be. One cannot help 
 asking, how long would the Ctrn Laws have been suffered thus to blight 
 commerce and agriculture, to cause division among classes, and to produce 
 penury, mortality and crime among the people, if the potato rot in Ireland 
 had not rendered it necessary to do something without delay ? 
 
 The potato rot, however, inspired the writing of Lord John Russell's 
 letter ; and Lord John Russell's letter inspired Sir Robert Peel with the 
 conviction that something must be done. Most of his colleagues were 
 inclined to go with him this time. A Cabinet Council was held on 
 November 25, almost immediately after the publication of Lord John 
 Russell's letter. At that council Sir Robert Peel recommended the sum- 
 moning of Parliament with a view to instant measures to combat the famine 
 in Ireland, but with a view also to some announcement of legislation in- 
 tended to pave the way for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Stanley 
 *till hesitated, and asked time to consider his decision. The Duke of
 
 198 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xv. 
 
 Wellington was unchanged in his private opinion that the Corn Laws 
 ought to be maintained ; but he declared, with a blunt simplicity, that his 
 only object in public life was ' to support Sir Robert Peel's administration 
 of the Government for the Queen.' 'A good Government for the country,' 
 said the sturdy and simple old hero, 'is more important than Corn Laws 
 or any other consideration.' One may smile at this notion of a good 
 Government without reference to the quality of the legislation it intro- 
 duces; it reminds one a little of the celebrated study of history without 
 reference to time and place. But the Duke acted strictly tip to his principles 
 jf duty, and he declared that if Sir Robert Peel considered the repeal of 
 the Corn Laws to be, not right or necessary for the welfare of England, 
 but requisite for the maintenance of Sir Robert Peel's position ' in Parlia- 
 ment and in the public view,' he should thoroughly support the proposal. 
 Lord Stanley, however, was not to be changed in the end. He took time 
 to consider, and seems really to have tried his best to persuade himself 
 that he could fall in with the new position which the Premier had 
 assumed. Meanwhile the most excited condition of public feeling prevailed 
 throughout London and the country generally. The Times newspaper 
 came out on December 4 with the announcement that the Ministry had 
 made up its mind, and that the Royal speech at the commencement of the 
 session would recommend an immediate consideration of the Corn Laws 
 preparatory to their total repeal. It would be hardly possible to exaggerate 
 the excitement caused by this startling piece of news. It was indignantly 
 and in unqualified terms declared a falsehood by the ministerial prints. Long 
 arguments were gone into to prove that even if the fact announced were true, 
 it could not possibly have been known to the Times. In Disraeli's ' Conings- 
 by ' Mr. Rigby gives the clearest and most convincing reasons to prove first 
 that Lord Spencer could not be dead, as report said he was ; and next, 
 that even if he were dead, the fact could not possibly be known to those 
 who took on themselves to announce it. He is hardly silenced even by 
 the assurance of a great duke that he is one of Lord Spencer's executors, 
 and that Lord Spencer was certainly dead. So the announcement in the 
 Times was fiercely and pedantically argued against. ' It can't be true ; ' 
 ' the Times could not get to know of it ; ' 'it must be a Cabinet secret if 
 it were true ; ' 'nobody outside the Cabinet could possibly know of it ; ' 'if 
 anyone outside the Cabinet could get to know of it, it would not be the 
 Times ; ' it would be this, that, or the other person or journal ; and so 
 forth. Long after it had been made certain, beyond even Mr. Rigby 's 
 power of disputation, that the announcement was true so far as the 
 resolve of the Prime Minister was concerned, people continued to argue 
 and controvert as to the manner in which the Times became possessed of
 
 I84c. A IIISTOKY 01" OUR OWN TIMES. 199 
 
 the aecrct. The general conclusion come to among the knowing was that 
 the blandishments of a gifted and beautiful lady with a dash of political 
 intrigue in her had somehow extorted the secret irorn a young and hand- 
 Home member of the Cabinet, and that she had communicated it to the 
 Times. It is not impossible that this may have been the true explanation. 
 It was believed in by a great many persons who might have been in a 
 position to judge of the probabilities. On the other hand, there were 
 surely signs and tokens enough by which a shrewd politician might have 
 guessed what was to come without any intervention of petticoat diplomacy. 
 It seems odd now that people should then have distressed themselves so 
 much by conjectures as to the source of the information, when once it was 
 made certain that the information itself was substantially true. This it un- 
 doubtedly was, although it did not tell all the truth, and could not foretell. 
 For there was an ordeal yet to be gone through before the Prime 
 Minister could put his plans into operation. On December 4 the Times 
 made the announcement. On the 6th, having been passionately contra- 
 dicted, it repeated the assertion. ' We adhere to our original announcement 
 that Parliament will meet early in January, and that a repeal of the Corn 
 Laws will be proposed in one House by Sir R. Peel, and in the other by the 
 Duke of Wellington.' But in the meantime the opposition in the Cabinet 
 had proved itself unmanageable. Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch 
 intimated to the Prime Minister that they could not be parties to any 
 measure involving the ultimate repeal of the Corn Laws. Sir Robert Peel 
 did not believe that he could carry out his project satisfactorily under 
 such circumstances, and he therefore hastened to tender his resignation to 
 the Queen. ' The other members of the Cabinet, without exception, I 
 believe ' these are Sir Robert Peel's own words ' concurred in this 
 opinion ; and under these circumstances I considered it to be my duty to 
 tender my resignation to her Majesty. On the 5th of December I repaired 
 to Osborne, Isle of Wight, and humbly solicited her Majesty to relieve me 
 from duties which I felt I could no longer discharge with advantage to her 
 Majesty's service.' The very day after the Times made its famous an- 
 nouncement, the very day before the Times repeated it, the Prime Minister 
 who was to propose the repeal of the Corn Laws went out of office. 
 
 Quern dixere chaos I Apparently chaos had come again. Lord John 
 Russell was sent for from Edinburgh. His letter had, without any such 
 purpose on his part, written him up as the man to take Sir Robert Peel's 
 place. Lord John Russell came to London and did his best to cope with 
 the many difficulties of the situation. His party were not very strong in 
 the country, and they had not a majority in the House of Commons. He 
 very naturally endeavoured to obtain from Peel a pledge that he would
 
 200 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. x\ 
 
 support the immediate and complete repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel, writing 
 to the Queen, ' humbly expresses his regret that he does not feel it to be 
 consistent with his duty to enter upon the consideration of this important 
 question in Parliament fettered by a previous engagement of the nature of 
 that required of him.' The position of Lord John Russell was awkward 
 He had been forced into it because one or two of Sir Robert Peel's col- 
 leagues would not consent to adopt the policy of their chief. But the 
 very fact of so stubborn an opposition from a man of Lord Stanley's in- 
 fluence showed clearly enough that the passing of Free Trade measures was 
 not to be effected without stern resistance from the country party. The 
 whole risk and burthen had seemingly been thrown on Lord John Russell ; 
 and now Sir Robert Peel would not even pledge himself to unconditional 
 support of the very policy which was understood to be his own. Lord John 
 Russell showed, even then, his characteristic courage. He resolved to 
 form a Ministry without a Parliamentary majority. He was not however 
 fated to try the ordeal. Lord Grey, who was a few months before Lord 
 Howick, and who had just succeeded to the title of his father (the stately 
 Charles Earl Grey, the pupil of Fox, and chief of the Cabinet which 
 passed the Reform Bill and abolished slavery) Lord Grey felt a strong 
 objection to the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston ; and these two could 
 not get on in one Ministry as it was part of Lord John Russell's plan that 
 they should do. Lord Grey also was strongly of opinion that a seat in 
 the Cabinet ought to be offered to Mr. Cobden ; but other great Whigs 
 could not bring themselves to any larger sacrifice to justice and common 
 sense than a suggestion that the office of Vice-President of the Board of 
 Trade should be tendered to the leader of the Free Trade movement. Mr. 
 Macaulay describes the event in a letter to a constituent in Edinburgh. 
 ' All our plans were frustrated by Lord Grey, who objected to Lord 
 Palmerston being Foreign Secretary. I hope that the public interests will 
 not suffer. Sir Robert Peel must now undertake the settlement of the 
 question. It is certain that he can settle it. It is by no means certain 
 that we could have done so. For we shall to a man support him ; and a 
 large proportion of those who are now in office would have refused to 
 support us.' One passage in Macaulay's letter will be read with peculiar 
 interest. ' From the first,' he says, 'I told Lord John Russell that 1 
 stipulated for one thing only total and immediate repeal of the Corn 
 Laws ; that my objections to gradual abolition were insurmountable ; but 
 that if he declared lor total and immediate repeal, I would be as to all other 
 matters absolutely in his hands ; that I would take any office or no office, 
 just as suited him beet ; and that he should never be disturbed by any per- 
 sonal pretensions or jealousies on mv part.' No one can doubt Macaulay '<
 
 1846. A HISTOJRY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 201 
 
 sincerity and singleness of purpose. But it is surprising to note the change 
 that the agitation of little more than two years had made in his opinions 
 on the subject of a policy of immediate and unconditional abolition. In 
 February 1843 he was pointing out to the electors of Edinburgh the un- 
 wisdom of refusing a compromise, and in December 1845 he is writing to 
 Edinburgh to say that the one only thing for which he must stipulate was 
 total and immediate repeal. The Anti-Corn Law League might well be 
 satisfied with the propagandist work they had done. The League itself 
 looked on very Composedly during these little altercations and embarrass- 
 ments of parties. They knew well enough now that let who would take power 
 he must carry out their policy. At a meeting of the League, which was 
 held in Covent Garden Theatre on the 17th of this memorable month, 
 and while the negotiations were still going on, Mr. Cobden declared that 
 he and his friends had not striven to keep one party in or another out of 
 office. ' We have worked with but one principle and one object in view ; 
 and if we maintain that principle for but six months more, we shall 
 attain to that state which I have so long and so anxiously desired, when 
 the League shall be dissolved into its primitive elements by the triumph 
 of its principles.' 
 
 Lord John Russell found it impossible to form a Ministry. He signi- 
 fied his failure to the Queen. Probably, having done the best he could, 
 he was not particularly distressed to find that his efforts were ineffectual. 
 The Queen had to send for Sir Hubert Peel to Windsor and tell him that 
 she must require him to withdraw his resignation and to remain in her 
 service. Sir Robert of course could only comply. The Queen offered 
 to give him some time to enter into communication with his colleagues; 
 but Sir Robert very wisely thought that he could speak with much greater 
 authority if he were to invite them to support him in an effort on which 
 he was determined and which he had positively undertaken to make. He 
 therefore returned from Windsor on the evening of December 20, ' having 
 resumed all the functions of First Minister of the Crown.' The Duke of 
 Buccleuch withdrew his opposition to the policy which Peel was now to 
 carry out ; but Lord Stanley remained firm. The place of the latter was 
 taken as Secretary of State for the Colonies by Mr. Gladstone, who however, 
 curiously enough, remained without a seat in Parliament during the event- 
 ful session that was now to come. Mr. Gladstone had sat for the borough 
 of Newark, but that borough being under the influence of the Duke of 
 Newcastle, who had withdrawn his support from the Ministry, he did not 
 invite re-election, but remained without a seat in the House or Commons 
 for some months. Sir Robert Peel then, to use his own words in a letter 
 to the Princess de Lieven, resumed power ' with greater means of renderins
 
 202 A HISTOEY OF DUE OWN TIMES. CH. XT. 
 
 public service than I should have done had I not relinquished it.' lie 
 elt, he said, ' like a man restored to life after his funeral service had been 
 preached.' 
 
 Parliament was summoned to meet in January. In the meantime it 
 was easily seen how the Protectionists and the Tories of the extreme order 
 generally would regard the proposals of Sir Robert Peel. Protectionist 
 meetings were held in various parts of the country, and they were all but 
 unanimous in condemning by anticipation the policy of the restored 
 Premier. Resolutions were passed at many of these meetings expressing 
 an equal disbelief in the Prime Minister and in the famine. The utmost 
 indignation was expressed at the idea of there being any famine in prospect 
 which could cause any departure from the principles which secured to the 
 farmers a certain fixed price for their grain, or at least prevented the price 
 from falling below what they considered a paying amount. Not less 
 absurd than the protestations that there would be no famine were some of 
 the remedies which were suggested for it if it should insist on coming in. 
 The Duke of Norfolk of that time made himself particularly conspicuous 
 by a beneficent suggestion which he offered to a distressed population. 
 He went about recommending a curry powder of his own device as a 
 charm against hunger. 
 
 Parliament met. The opening day was January 22, 1846. The 
 Queen in person opened the session, and the speech from the throne said a 
 good deal about the condition of Ireland and the failure of the potato crop. 
 The speech contained one significant sentence. ' I have had,' her Majesty 
 was made to say, ' great satisfaction in giving my assent to the measures 
 which you have presented to me from time to time, calculated to extend 
 commerce and to stimulate domestic skill and industry, by the repeal of 
 prohibitive and the relaxation of protective duties. I recommend you to 
 take into your early consideration whether the principle on which you 
 have acted may not with advantage be yet more extensively applied.' 
 Before the address in reply to the speech from the throne was moved, Sir 
 Robert Peel gave notice of the intention of the Government on the earliest 
 possible day to submit to the consideration of the House measures con- 
 nected with the commercial and financial affairs of the country. 
 
 There are few scenes more animated and exciting than that presented 
 by the House of Commons on some night when a great debate is expected, 
 or when some momentous announcement is to be made. A common thrill 
 seems to tremble all through the assembly as a breath of wind runs across 
 the sea. The House appears for the moment to be one body pervaded by 
 one expectation. The ministerial benches, the front benches of opposition, 
 are occupied by the men of political renown and of historic name. The
 
 1846 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 203 
 
 benches everywhere else are crowded to their utmost capacity. Member? 
 who cannot get seats on such occasion a goodly number stand below 
 the bar or have to dispose themselves along the side galleries. The celeb- 
 rities are not confined to the Treasury benches or those of the leaders of 
 opposition. Here and there, among the independent members and below 
 the gangway on both sides, are seen men of influence and renown. At 
 the opening of Parliament in 1846 this was especially to be observed. 
 The rising fame of the Free Trade leaders made them almost like a third 
 great party in the House of Commons. The strangers' gallery, the 
 Speaker's gallery on such a night are crowded to excess. The eye surveys 
 the whole House and sees no vacant place. In the very hurn of conver- 
 sation that runs along the benches there is a tone of profound anxiety. 
 The minister who has to face that House and make the announcement for 
 which all are waiting in a most feverish anxiety is a man to be envied by 
 the ambitious. This time there was a curiosity about everything. What 
 was the minister about to announce 1 When and in what fashion would 
 he announce it ? Would the Whig leaders speak before the ministerial 
 announcement? Would the Free Traders? What voice would first hint 
 to the expectant Commons the course which political events were destined 
 to take ? The moving of an address to the throne is always a formal piece 
 of business. It would be hardly possible for Cicero or Burke to be very 
 interesting when performing such a task. On the other hand, it is an ex- 
 cellent chance for a young beginner. He finds the House in a sort of con- 
 temptuously indulgent mood, prepared to welcome the slightest evidence of 
 any capacity of speech above the dullest mediocrity. He can hardly say 
 anything absurd or offensive unless he goes absolutely out of his way to 
 make a fool of himself ; and on the other hand, he can easily say his little 
 nothings in a graceful way, and receive grateful applause accordingly from 
 an assembly which counts on being bored, and feels doubly indebted to 
 the speaker who is even in the slightest degree an agreeable disappoint- 
 ment. On this particular occasion, however, the duty of the proposer 
 and the seconder of the address was made specially trying by the fact 
 that they had to interfere with merely formal utterances between an 
 eager House and an exciting announcement. A certain piquancy was 
 lent however to the performance of the duty by the fact, which the 
 speeches made evident beyond the possibility of mistake, that the proposer 
 of the address knew quite well what the Government were about to do, 
 and that the seconder knew nothing whatever. 
 
 Now the formal task is done. The address has been moved and 
 seconded. The Speaker puts the question that the address be adopted. 
 Now is the time for debate, if debate there is to be. On such occasions
 
 204 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xv. 
 
 here is always some discussion, but it is commonly as mere a piece of for- 
 aiality as the address itself. It is understood that the leader of opposition 
 will say something meaning next to nothing ; that two or three men will 
 grumble vaguely at the Ministry ; that the leader of the House will reply ; 
 and then the affair is all over. But on this occasion it was certain that 
 some momentous announcement would have to be made ; and the question 
 was when it would come. Perhaps no one expected exactly what did 
 happen. Nothing can be more unusual than for the leader of the House 
 to open the debate on such an occasion ; and Sir Robert Peel was usually 
 somewhat of a formalist, who kept to the regular ways in all that per- 
 tained to the business of the House. No eyes of expectation were turned 
 therefore to the ministerial bench at the moment after the formal putting 
 of the question by the Speaker. It was rather expected that Lord John 
 Russell, or perhaps Mr. Cobden, would rise. But a surprised murmur 
 running through all parts of the House soon told those who could not see 
 the Treasury bench that something unusual had happened ; and in a 
 moment the voice of the Prime Minister was heard that marvellous 
 voice of which Lord Beaconsfield says that it had not in his time any 
 equal in the House ' unless we except the thrilling tones of O'Connell ' 
 and it was known that the great explanation was coming at once. 
 
 The explanation even now, however, was somewhat deferred. The 
 Prime Minister showed a deliberate intention, it might have been thought, 
 not to come to the point at once. He went into long and laboured ex- 
 planations of the manner in which his mind had been brought into a 
 change on the subject of Free Trade and Protection ; and he gave 
 exhaustive calculations to show that the reduction of duty was constantly 
 followed by expansion of the revenue, and even a maintenance of high 
 prices. The duties on glass, the duties on flax, the prices of salt pork 
 and domestic lard, the contract price of salt beef for the navy these and 
 many other such topics were discussed at great length, and with elaborate 
 fulness of detail in the hearing of an eager House, anxious only for that 
 night to know whether or not the minister meant to introduce the princi 
 pie of Free Trade. Peel, however, made it clear enough that he had be- 
 come a complete convert to the doctrines of the Manchester school, and 
 that in his opinion the time had come when that protection which he had 
 taken office to maintain must for ever be abandoned. One sentence at the 
 close of his speech was made the occasion of much laboured criticism and 
 some severe accusation. It was that in which Peel declared that he found 
 it ' no easy task to ensure the harmonious and united action of an ancient 
 monarchy, a proud aristocracy, and a reformed House of Commons.' 
 
 The explanation was over. The House of Commons were left rathei
 
 i846. A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 20. r ) 
 
 to infer than to understand what the Government proposed to do. Lord 
 John Russell entered into some personal explanations relating to his en- 
 deavour to form a Ministry, and the causes of its failure. These have not 
 much interest for a later time. It might have seemed that the work of the 
 night was done. It was evident that the ministerial policy could not be 
 discussed then ; for, in fact, it had not been announced. The House knew 
 thnt the Prime Minister was a convert to the principles of Free Trade ; 
 but that was all that anyone could be said to know except those who were 
 in the secrets of the Cabinet. There appeared therefore nothing for it but 
 to wait until the time should come for the formal announcement and the 
 full discussion of Government measures. Suddenly, however, a new and 
 striking figure intervened in the languishing debate, and filled the House 
 of Commons with a fresh life. There is not often to be found in our Par- 
 liamentary history an example like this of a sudden turn given to a whole 
 career by a timely speech. The member who rose to comment on the ex- 
 planation of Sir Robert Peel had been for many years in the House of 
 Commons. This was his tenth session. He had spoken often in each 
 session. He had made many bold attempts to win a name in Parliament, 
 and hitherto his political career had been simply a failure. From the hour 
 when he spoke this speech, it was one long, unbroken, brilliant success. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 MR. DISRAELI. 
 
 THE .speaker who rose into such sudden prominence and something like 
 the position of a party leader was one of the most remarkable men the 
 politics of the reign have produced. Perhaps, if the word remarkable were 
 to be used in its most strict sense, and without particular reference to praise, 
 it would be just to describe him as emphatically the most remarkable man 
 that the political controversies of the present reign have called into power. 
 Mr. Disraeli entered the House of Commons as Conservative member for 
 Maidstone in 1837. He was then about thirty-two years of age. He had 
 previously made repeated and unsuccessful attempts to get a seat in Parlia- 
 ment. He began his political career as an advanced Liberal, and had come 
 out under the auspices of Daniel O'Connell and Joseph Hume. He had 
 described himself as one who desired to light the battle of the people, and 
 who was supported by neither of the aristocratic parties. lie tailed again 
 and again, and apparently he began to think that it would be a wiser thing 
 to look for the support of one or other of the aristocratic parties. He hac 1
 
 206 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvi. 
 
 before this given indications of remarkable literary talent, if indeed it might 
 not be called genius. His novel, 'Vivian Grey,' published when he was 
 in his twenty-third year, was suffused with extravagance, affectation, and 
 mere animal spirits ; but it was full of the evidences of a fresh and brilliant 
 ability. The son of a distinguished literary man, Mr. Disraeli had probably 
 at that time only a young literary man's notions of politics. It is not ne- 
 cessary to charge him with deliberate inconsistency because from having 
 been a Radical of the most advanced views he became by an easy leap a 
 romantic Tory. It is not likely that at the beginning of his career he had 
 any very clear ideas in connection with the words Tory or Radical. He 
 wrote a letter to Mr. W, J. Fox, already described as an eminent Unitarian 
 minister and rising politician, in which he declared that Iris forte was sedi- 
 tion. Most clever young men who are not born to fortune, and who feel 
 drawn into political life, fancy too that their forte is sedition. When young 
 Disraeli found that sedition and even advanced Radicalism did not do much 
 to get him into Parliament, he probably began to ask himself whether his 
 Liberal convictions were so deeply rooted as to call for the sacrifice of a 
 career. He thought the question over, and doubtless found himself crys- 
 tallising fast into an advocate of the established order of things. In a 
 purely personal light, this was a fortunate conclusion for the ambitious 
 young politician. He could not then have anticipated the extraordinary 
 change which was to be wrought in the destiny and the composition of the 
 Tory party by the eloquence, the arguments, and the influence of two men 
 who at that time were almost absolutely unknown. Mr. Cobden stood for 
 the first time as a candidate for a seat in Parliament in the year that saw 
 Mr. Disraeli elected for the first time, and Mr. Cobden was unsuccessful. 
 Cobden had to wait four years before he found his way into the House of 
 Commons ; Bright did not become a member of Parliament until some two 
 years later still. It was, however, the Anti-Corn Law agitation which, by 
 conquering Peel and making him its advocate, brought abou: the memorable 
 split in the Conservative party, and carried away from the cause of the 
 country squires nearly all the men of talent who had hitherto been with 
 them. A new or middle party of so-called Peelites was formed. Graham, 
 Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, and other men of equal mark or 
 promise, joined it; and the country party was left to seek for leadership in 
 the earnest spirit and very moderate talents of Lord George Bentinck. 
 Mr. Disraeli then found his chance. His genius was such that it must 
 have made a way for him anywhere and in spite of any competition ; but 
 it is not too much to say that his career of political advancement might 
 have been very different if, in place of finding himself the only man of 
 first-class ability in the party to which he had attached himself, he had
 
 1820-37. A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 207 
 
 been a member of u party which had Palmerston and Russell and Gladstone 
 and Graham for its tiaptains, and Col'den and Bright for its habitual 
 supporters. 
 
 This, however, could not have been in Mr. Disraeli's thoughts when 
 he changed from Radicalism to Conservatism. No trace of the progress 
 of conversion can be found in his speeches or his writings. It is not un- 
 reasonable to infer that he took up Radicalism at the beginning because it 
 looked the most picturesque and romantic thing to do, and that only as he 
 found it fail to answer his personal object did it occur to him that he had 
 after all more affinity with the cause of the country gentlemen. The repu- 
 tation he had made for himself before his going into Parliament was of a 
 nature rather calculated to retard than to advance a political career. He 
 was looked upon almost universally as an eccentric and audacious adven- 
 turer, who was kept from being dangerous by the affectations and absurdities 
 of his conduct. He dressed in the extremest style of preposterous foppery ; 
 he talked a blending of cynicism and sentiment ; he had made the most 
 reckless statements; his boasting was almost outrageous; his rhetoric of 
 abuse was, even in that free-spoken time, astonishingly vigorous and un- 
 restrained. Even his literar}' efforts did not then receive anything like 
 the appreciation they have obtained since. At that time they were regarded 
 rather as audacious whimsicalities, the fantastic freaks of a clever youth, 
 than as genuine works of a certain kind of art. Even when he did get 
 into the House of Commons, his first experience there was little calculated 
 to give him much hope of success. Reading over this first speech now, it 
 seems hard to understand why it should have excited so much laughter 
 and derision ; why it should have called forth nothing but laughter and 
 derision. It is a clever speech, full of point and odd conceits; very like 
 in style and structure many of the speeches which in later years won for 
 the same orator the applause of the House of Commons. But Mr. Disraeli's 
 reputation had preceded him into the House. Up to this time his life had 
 been, says an unfriendly but not an unjust critic, ' an almost uninterrupted 
 career of follies and defeats.' The House was probably in a humour to 
 find the speech ridiculous because the general impression was that the man 
 himself was ridiculous. Mr. Disraeli's appearance, too, no doubt, con- 
 tributed something to the. contemptuous opinion which was formed of him 
 on his first attempt to address the assembly which he afterwards came to 
 rule. He is described by an observer as having been attired ' in a bottle- 
 green frock coat and a waistcoat of white, of the Dick Swiveller pattern, 
 the front of which exhibited a network of glittering chains ; large fancy- 
 pattern pantaloons, and a black tie, above which no shirt-collar was visible, 
 completed the outward man. A countenance lividly pale, set out by a
 
 208 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. : , r . *n. 
 
 pair of intensely black eyes, and a broad but not very high forehead, over- 
 hung by clustering ringlets of coal-black hair, which, combed away from 
 the right temple, fell in bunches of well-oiled small ringlets over his left 
 cheek.' His manner was intensely theatric ; his gestures were wild and 
 extravagant. In all this there is not much, however, to surprise those who 
 knew Mr. Disraeli in his greater days. His style was always extravagant; 
 his rhetoric constantly degenerated into vulgarity ; his whole manner was 
 that of the typical foreigner whom English people regard as the illustration 
 of all that is vehement and unquiet. But whatever the cause, it is certain 
 that on the occasion of his first attempt Mr. Disraeli made not merely a 
 failure, but even a ludicrous failure. One who heard the debate thus 
 describes the manner in which, baffled by the persistent laughter and other 
 interruptions of the noisy House, the orator withdrew from the discussion, 
 defeated but not discouraged. ' At last, losing his temper, which until 
 now he had preserved in a wonderful manner, he paused in the midst of a 
 sentence, and looking the Liberals indignantly in the face, raised his hands, 
 and opening his mouth as widely as its dimensions would admit, said in a 
 remarkably loud and almost terrific tone, " I have begun several times, 
 many things and I have often succeeded at last ; ay, sir, and though I sit 
 down now, the time will come when you will hear me." ' This final pre 
 diction is so like what a manufacturer of biography would make up for a 
 hero, and is so like what was actually said in one or two other remarkable 
 instances, that a reader might be excused for doubting its authenticity in 
 this case. But nothing can be more certain than the fact that Mr. Disraeli 
 did bring to a close his maiden speech in the House of Commons with this 
 bold prediction. The words are to be found in the reports published next 
 morning in all the daily papers of the metropolis. 
 
 It was thus that Mr. Disraeli began his career as a Parliamentary 
 orator. It is a curious fact that on that occasion almost the only one of 
 his hearers who seems to have admired the speech was Sir Robert Peel. 
 It is by his philippic against Peel that Disraeli is now about to convince 
 the House of Commons that the man they laughed at before is a great 
 Parliamentary orator. 
 
 Disraeli was not in the least discouraged by his first lailure. A few 
 days after it he spoke again, and he spoke three or four times more during 
 his first session. But he had learned some wisdom by rough experience, 
 and he did not make his oratorical nights so long or so ambitious as that 
 first attempt. Then he seemed after a while, as he grew more familiar 
 with the House, to go in for being paradoxical ; for making himself always 
 conspicuous ; for taking up positions and expounding political creeds 
 which other men would have avoided. It is very difficult to get any clear
 
 1837-46. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 209 
 
 ide:i of what his opinions were about this period of his career, if he had 
 any political opinions at all. Our impression is that lie really had no 
 opinions at that time ; that he was only in quest of opinions. He spoke 
 on subjects of which it was evident, that he knew nothing, and sometimes 
 he managed, by the sheer force of a strong intelligence, to discern the 
 absurdity of economic sophistries which had baffled men of far greater 
 experience, and which indeed, to judge from his personal declarations and 
 political conduct afterwards, he allowed before long to baffle and bewilder 
 himself. More often, however, he talked with a grandiose and oracular 
 vagueness which seemed to imply that he alone of all men saw into the 
 very heart of the question, but that he, of all men, must not yet reveal 
 what he saw. At his best of times Mr. Disraeli was an example of that 
 class of being whom Macaulay declares to be so rare that Lord Chatham 
 appears to him almost a solitary illustration of it ' a great man of real 
 genius and of a brave, lofty and commanding spirit, without simplicity of 
 character.' What Macaulay goes on to say of Chatham will bear quota- 
 tion too. ' He was an actor in the closet, an actor at council, an actor in 
 Parliament; and even in private society he could not lay aside his 
 theatrical tones and attitudes.' Mr. Disraeli was at one period of his 
 career so affected that he positively affected affectation. Yet he was a 
 man of undoubted genius ; he had a spirit that never quailed under stress 
 of any circumstances, however disheartening ; he commanded as scarcely 
 any statesman since Chatham himself has been able to do ; and it would 
 be unjust and absurd to deny to a man gifted with qualities like these the 
 possession of a lofty nature. 
 
 For some time Mr. Disraeli then seemed resolved to make himsell 
 remarkable to be talked about. He succeeded admirably. He was 
 talked about. All the political and satirical journals of the day had a 
 great deal to say about him. He is not spoken of in terms of praise as a 
 rule. Neither has he much praise to shower about him. Anyone who 
 looks back to the political controversies of that time will be astounded at 
 the language which Mr. Disraeli addresses to his opponents of the press, 
 and which his opponents address to him. In some cases it is no exagge- 
 ration to say that a squabble between two Billingsgate fishwomen in our 
 day would have good chance of ending without the use of words and 
 phrases so coarse as those which then passed between this brilliant literary 
 man and some of his assailants. We have all read the history of the 
 controversy between him and O'Connell, and the savage ferocity of the 
 language with which O'Connell denounced him as ' a miscreant,' as ' a 
 wretch,' 'a liar,' ' whose life is a living lie; ' and finally as ' the heir-at- 
 law of the blasphemous thief who died impenitent on the Cross.' Mr 
 
 vor,. i. P
 
 210 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xvi. 
 
 Disraeli begins his reply by describing himself as one of those who ' will 
 ,iot be insulted even by a Yahoo without chastising it; ' and afterwards, 
 in a letter to one of Mr. O'Connell'a sons, declares his desire to express 
 ' the utter scorn in which 1 hold his [Mr. O'Connell's] character, and the 
 disgust with which his conduct inspires me ; ' and informs the son that 
 ' I shall take every opportunity of holding your father's name up to public 
 contempt, and I fervently pray that you or some one of your Hood may 
 attempt to avenge the inextinguishable hatred with which I shall pursue 
 his existence.' In reading' of a controversy like this between two public 
 men, we seem to be transported back to an age having absolutely nothing 
 in common with our own. It appears almost impossible to believe that 
 men still active in political life were active in political life then. Yet this 
 is not the most astonishing specimen of the sort of controversy in which 
 Mr. Disraeli became engaged in his youngor days. Nothing perhaps that 
 the political literature of the time preserves could exceed the ferocity of 
 his controversial duel with O'Connell ; but there are many samples of the 
 rhetoric of abuse to be found in the journals of the time which would far 
 less bear exposure to the gaze of the fastidious public of our day. The 
 duelling system survived then and for long after, and Mr. Disraeli always 
 professed himself ready to sustain with his pistol anything that his lips 
 might have given utterance to, even in the reckless heat of controversy. 
 The social temper which in our time insists that the first duty of a gentle- 
 man is to apologise for an unjust or offensive expression used in debate 
 was unknown then. Perhaps it could hardly exist to any great extent in 
 the company of the duelling system. When a man's withdrawal of an 
 offensive expression might be imputed to a want of physical courage, the 
 courtesy which impels a gentleman to atone for a wrong is not likely to 
 triumph very often over the fear of being accounted a coward. If anyone 
 doubts the superiority of manners as well as of morals which comes of 
 our milder ways, he has only to read a few specimens of the controversies 
 of Mr. Disraeli's earlier days, when men who aspired to be considered great 
 political leaders thought it not unbecoming to call names like a coster- 
 monger, and to swagger like Bobadil or the Copper Captain. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli kept himself well up to the level of his time in the calling 
 of names and the swaggering. But he was making himself remarkable in 
 political controversy as well. In the House of Commons he began to be 
 regarded as a dangerous adversary in debate. He was wonderfully ready 
 with retort and sarcasm. But during all the earlier part of his career he 
 was thought of only as a free lance. He had praised Peel when Peel said 
 something that suited him, or when to praise Peel seemed likely to wound 
 someone elee. But it was during the debates on the abolition of the Corn
 
 1846. A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 211 
 
 Laws that he first rose to the fame of a great debater and a powerful 
 Parliamentary orator. We use the words powerful Parliamentary orator 
 with the purpose of conveying a special qualification, lie is a great 
 Parliamentary orator who can employ the kind of eloquence and argument 
 which tell most readily on Parliament. But it must not be supposed that 
 the great Parliamentary orator is necessarily a great orator in the wider 
 sense. Some of the men who made the greatest successes as Parliamen- 
 tary orators have failed to win any genuine reputations as orators of the 
 broader and higher school. The fame of Charles Townshend's 'champagne 
 speech ' has vanished, evanescent almost as the bubbles from which it 
 derived its inspiration and its name. No one now reads many even of 
 the fragments preserved for us of those speeches of Sheridan which those 
 who heard them declared to have surpassed all ancient and modern 
 eloquence. The House of Commons often found Burke dull, and the 
 speeches of Burke have passed into English literature secure of a per- 
 petual place there. Mr. Disraeli never succeeded in being more than a 
 Parliamentary orator, and probably would not have cared to be anything 
 more. But even at this comparatively early date, and while he had still 
 the reputation of being a whimsical, self-confident and feather-headed 
 adventurer, he soon won for himself the name of one who could hold his 
 own in retort and in sarcasm against any antagonist. The days of the 
 more elaborate oratory were going by, and the time was coming when the 
 pungent epigram, the sparkling paradox, the rattling attack, the vivid 
 repartee, would count for the most attractive part of eloquence with the 
 House of Commons. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli was exactly the man to succeed under the new conditions 
 of Parliamentary eloquence. Hitherto he had wanted a cause to inspire 
 and justify audacity, and on which to employ with effect his remarkable 
 resources of sarcasm and rhetoric. Hitherto he had addressed an audience 
 out of sympathy with him for the most part. Now he was about to 
 become the spokesman of a large body of men who, chafing and almost 
 choking with wrath, were not capable of speaking effectively for them- 
 selves. Mr. Disraeli did therefore the very wisest thing he could do when 
 he launched at once into a savage personal attack upon Sir Robert Peel. 
 The speech abounds in passages of audaciously powerful sarcasm. ' T am 
 not one of the converts,' Mr. Disraeli said. ' I am perhaps a member of a 
 fallen party. To the opinions which I have expressed in this House in 
 favour of Protection I still adhere. They sent me to this House, and if I 
 had relinquished them I should have relinquished my seat also.' That was 
 the key-note of the speech. He denounced Sir Eobert Peel, not for 
 having changed his opinions, but for having retained a position which 
 
 p 2
 
 212 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. OH. xvi 
 
 enabled him to betray his party. He compared Peel to the Lord High 
 Admiral of the Turkish fleet, who at a great warlike crisis, when he w;is 
 placed at the head of the finest armament that ever left the Dardanelles 
 since the days of Solyman the Great, steered at once for the enemy's port, 
 and when arraigned as a traitor, said that he really saw no use in pro- 
 longing a hopeless struggle, and that he had accepted the command of the 
 fleet only to put the Sultan out of pain by bringing the struggle to a close 
 at once. ' Well do we remember, on this side of the House not perhaps 
 without a blush the efforts we made to raise him to the bench where he 
 now sits. Who does not remember the sacred cause of Protection for 
 which sovereigns were thwarted, Parliament dissolved, and a nation taken 
 in ? ' 'I belong to a party which can triumph no more, for we have 
 nothing left on our side except the constituencies which we have not 
 betrayed.' He denounced Peel as ' a man who never originates an idea ; 
 a watcher of the atmosphere ; a man who takes his observations, and 
 when he finds the wind in a particular quarter trims his sails to suit it ; ' 
 and he declared that ' such a man may be a powerful minister, but he is 
 no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage ia 
 a great whip.' 
 
 ' The opportune,' says Mr. Disraeli himself in his ' Lord George 
 Bentinck,' ' in a popular assembly has sometimes more success than the 
 weightiest efforts of research and reason.' He is alluding to this very 
 speech, of which he says, with perhaps a superfluous modesty, that ' it 
 was the long constrained passion of the House that now found a vent far 
 more than the sallies of the speaker that changed the frigid silence of this 
 senate into excitement and tumult.' The speech was indeed opportune. 
 But it was opportune in a far larger sense than as a timely philippic rat- 
 tling up an exhausted and disappointed House. That moment Avhen 
 Disraeli rose was the very turning point of the fortunes of his party. 
 There was genius, there was positive statesmanship, in seizing so boldly 
 and so adroitly on the moment. It would have been a great thing gained 
 for Peel if he could have got through that first night without any alarm 
 note of opposition from his own side. The habits of Parliamentary dis- 
 cipline are very clinging. They are hard to tear away. Every impulse 
 of association and training protests against the very effort to rend them 
 asunder. A once powerful minister exercises a control over his long 
 obedient followers somewhat like that of the heart of the Bruce in the 
 fine old Scottish story. Those who once followed will still obey the name 
 and the symbol even when the actual power to lead is gone for ever. If 
 one other night's habitude had been added to the long discipline that 
 bound his party to Peel; if they had allowed themselves to listen to that
 
 1846. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 213 
 
 declaration of the session's first night without murmur, perhaps they 
 might never have rebelled. Mr. Disraeli drew together into one focus all 
 the rays of their gathering anger against Peel, and made them light into a 
 (lame. He showed the genius of the born leader, by stepping forth at the 
 critical moment and giving the word of command. 
 
 From that hour Mr. Disraeli was the real leader of the Tory squires : 
 from that moment his voice gave the word of command to the Tory party. 
 There was peculiar courage too in the part he took. He must have known 
 that he was open to one retort from Peel that might have crushed a ICSH 
 confident man. It was well known that when Peel was coining into power 
 Disraeli expected to be offered a place of some kind in the Ministry, arid 
 would have accepted it. Mr. Disraeli afterwards explained, when Peel 
 made allusion to the fact, that he had never put himself directly forward 
 as a candidate for office ; but there had undoubtedly been some negotia- 
 tion going forward which was conducted on Mr. Disraeli's side by someone 
 who supposed he was doing what Disraeli would like to have done ; and 
 Peel had not taken any hint, and would not in any way avail himself of 
 Disraeli's services. Disraeli must have known that when he attacked Peel 
 the latter would hardly fail to make use of this obvious retort ; but he 
 felt little daunted on that score. He could have made a fair enough 
 defence of his consistency in any case, but he knew very well that what 
 the indignant Tories wanted just then was not a man who had been 
 uniformly consistent, but one who could attack Sir Robert Peel without 
 scruple and with effect. Disraeli made his own career by the course he 
 took on that memorable night, and he also made a new career for the 
 Tory party. 
 
 Now that he had proved himself so brilliant a spadassin in this debate, 
 men began to remember that he had dealt trenchant blows before. Many 
 of his sentences attacking Peel, which have passed into familiar quotation 
 almost like proverbs, were spoken in 1845. He had accused the great 
 minister of having borrowed his tactics from the Whigs. ' The right 
 honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing and he walked away 
 with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal 
 position, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.' ' I 
 look on the right honourable gentleman as a man who has tamed the 
 shrew of Liberalism by her own tactics. He is the political Petruchic 
 who has outbid yoii all.' ' If the right honourable gentleman would only 
 stick to quotation instead of having recourse to obloquy, he may rely upon 
 it he would find it a safer weapon. It is one he always wields with the 
 hand of a master, and when he does appeal to any authority in prose or 
 verse, he is sure to be successful, partly because he seldom quotes a pas-
 
 274 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH xn. 
 
 sage that has not already received the meed of Parliamentary approbation.' 
 We can all readily understand how such a hit as the last would tell in the 
 case of an orator like Peel, who had the old-fashioned way of introducing 
 long quotations from approved classic authors into his speeches, and who 
 not unfrequently introduced citations which were received with all the 
 better welcome by the House because of the familiarity of their language 
 More fierce and cutting was the reference to Canning, with whom Peel had 
 quarrelled, and the implied contrast of Canning with Peel. Sir Robert 
 had cited against Disraeli Canning's famous lines praying to be saved from 
 a * candid friend.' Disraeli seized the opportunity thus given. ' The 
 name of Canning is one,' he said, ' never to be mentioned, I am sure, in 
 this House without emotion. We all admire his genius ; we all, or at 
 least most of us, deplore his untimely end ; and we all sympathise with 
 him in his severe struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity, 
 with inveterate foes and with candid friends.' The phrase ' sublime me- 
 diocrity ' had a marvellous effect. As a hostile description of Peel's 
 character, it had enough of seeming truth about it to tell most effectively 
 alike on friends and enemies of the great leader. A friend, or even an 
 impartial enemy, would not indeed admit that it accurately described 
 Peel's intellect and position ; but as a stroke of personal satire it touched 
 nearly enough the characteristics of its object to impress itself at once as a 
 master-hit on the minds of all who caught its instant purpose. The words 
 remained in use long after the controversy and its occasion had passed 
 away ; and it was allowed that an unfriendly and bitter critic could hardly 
 have found a phrase more suited to its ungenial purpose or more likely to 
 connect itself at once in the public mind with the name of him who was 
 its object. Mr. Disraeli did not in fact greatly admire Canning. He has 
 left a very disparaging criticism of Canning as an orator in one of his 
 novels. On the other hand, he has shown in his ' Life of Lord George 
 Bentinck ' that he could do full justice to some of the greatest qualities of 
 Sir Robert Peel. But at the moment of his attacking Peel and crying up 
 Canning he was only concerned to disparage the one, and it was ou this 
 account that he eulogised the other. The famous sentence too in which 
 he declared that a Conservative Government was an ' organised hypocrisy ' 
 was spoken during the debates of the Session of 1845, before the explana- 
 tion of the minister on the subject of Free Trade. All these brilliant 
 things men now began to recall. Looking back from this distance of 
 time, we can see well enough that Mr. Disraeli had displayed hie peculiar 
 genius long before the House of Commons took the pains to recognise it. 
 From the night of the opening of the session of 184G it was never ques- 
 tioned. Thenceforward he was really the mouthpiece and the sense-carrier
 
 1840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 216 
 
 of his party. For some time to come indeed his nominal post might have 
 seemed to be only that of its bravo. The country gentlemen who cheered 
 to the echo his fierce attacks on Peel during the debates of the session of 
 1846, had probably not the slightest suspicion that the daring rhetorician 
 who was so savagely revenging them on their now hated leader was a man 
 of as cool a judgment, as long a head, and as complete a capacity for the 
 control of any party as any politician who for generations had appeared in 
 the House of Commons. 
 
 One immediate effect of the turn thus given by Disraeli's timely inter- 
 vention in the debate was the formation of a Protection party in the House 
 of Commons. The leadership of this perilous adventure was entrusted to 
 Lord George Bentinck, a sporting nobleman of energetic character, greal 
 tenacity of purpose and conviction, and a not inconsiderable aptitude for 
 politics which had hitherto had no opportunity for either exercising or 
 displaying itself. Lord George Bentinck had sat in eight Parliaments 
 without taking part in any great debate. When he was suddenly drawn 
 into the leadership of the Protection party in the House of Commons, he 
 gave himself up to it entirely. He had at first only joined the party as 
 one of its organisers ; but he showed himself in many respects well fitted 
 for the leadership, and the choice of leaders was in any case very limited. 
 When once he had accepted the position, he was unwearying in his atten- 
 tion to its duties ; and indeed up to the moment of his sudden and prema- 
 ture death he never allowed himself any relaxation from the cares it 
 imposed on him. Mr. Disraeli, in his ' Life of Lord George Bentinck,' 
 has indeed overrated, with the pardonable extravagance of friendship, the 
 intellectual gifts of his leader. Bentinck's abilities were hardly even of 
 the second class ; and the amount of knowledge which he brought to bear 
 on the questions he discussed with so much earnestness and energy was 
 often and of necessity little better than mere cram. But in Parliament 
 the essential qualities of a leader are not great powers of intellect. A man 
 of cool head, good temper, firm will, and capacity for appreciating the 
 serviceable qualities of other men, may, always provided that he has high 
 birth and great social influence, make a very successful leader, even though 
 he be wanting altogether in the higher attributes of eloquence and states- 
 manship. It may be doubted whether, on the whole, great eloquence and 
 genius are necessary at all to the leader of a party in Parliament in times 
 not specially troublous. Bentinck had patience, energy, good humour, 
 and considerable appreciation of the characters of men. If he had a bad 
 voice, was a poor speaker, talked absolute nonsense about protective duties 
 and sugar and guano, and made up absurd calculations to prove impossi- 
 bilities and paradoxes, he at least always spoke in full faith and was only
 
 2 If) A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvi. 
 
 the more necessary to his party because he could honestly continue to 
 believe in the old doctrines, no matter what political economy and hard 
 facts might say to the contrary. 
 
 The secession was, therefore, in full course of organisation. On 
 January 27 Sir Robert Peel came forward to explain his financial policy. 
 It is almost superfluous to say that the most intense anxiety prevailed all 
 over the country, and that the House was crowded. An incident of the 
 night, which then created a profound sensation, would not be worth 
 noticing now but for the evidence it gives of the bitterness with which the 
 Protection party were filled, and of the curiously bad taste of which 
 gentlemen of position and education can be guilty under the inspiration 
 of a blind fanaticism. There is something h;dicrous in the pompous tone 
 as of righteous indignation deliberately repressed, with which Mr. Disraeli, 
 in his Life of Bentinck, announces the event. The proceedings in the 
 House of Commons, he says, ' were ushered in by a startling occurrence.' 
 What was this portentous preliminary ? ' His Eoyal Highness the Prince 
 Consort, attended by the Master of the Horse, appeared and took his seat 
 in the body of the House to listen to the statement of the First Minister. 
 In other words, there was to be a statement of great importance and a 
 debate of profound interest, and the husband of the Queen was anxious to 
 be a listener. The Prince Consort did not understand that because he had 
 married the Queen he was therefore to be precluded from hearing a dis- 
 cussion in the House of Commons. The poorest man and the greatest man 
 in the land were alike free to occupy a seat in one of the galleries of the 
 House, and it is not to be wondered at if the Prince Consort fancied that 
 he too might listen to a debate without unhinging the British Constitution. 
 Lord George Bentinck and the Protectionists were aflame with indigna- 
 tion. They saw in the quiet presence of the intelligent gentleman who 
 came to listen to the discussion an attempt to overawe the Commons 
 and compel them to bend to the will of the Crown. It is not easy to read 
 without a feeling of shame the absurd and tinseemly comments which were 
 made upon this harmless incident. The Queen herself has given an ex- 
 planation of the Prince's visit which is straightforward and dignified. 
 ' The Prince merely went, as the Prince of Wales and the Queen's other 
 sons do, for once, to hear a fine debate, which is so useful to all princes.' 
 ' But this,' the Queen adds, ' he naturally felt unable to do again.' 
 
 The Prime Minister announced his policy. His object was to abandon 
 the sliding scale altogether; but for the present he intended to impose a 
 duty of ten shillings a quarter on corn when the price of it was under 
 forty-eight shillings a quarter ; to reduce that duty by one shilling for 
 every shilling of rise in price until it reached fifty-three shillings a
 
 1846. A HISTOltY 01-' OUR OWN TIMES. 217 
 
 quarter, when the duty should full to four shillings. This arrangement 
 was, however, only to hold good for three years, at the end of which time 
 protective duties on grain were to be wholly abandoned. Peel explained 
 that he intended gradually to apply the principle of Free Trade to manu- 
 factures and every description of produce, bearing in mind the necessity 
 of providing for the expenditure of the country, and of smoothing away 
 some of the difficulties which a sudden withdrawal of protection might cause. 
 The differential duties on sugar, which were professedly intended to protect 
 the growers of free sugars against the competition of those who cultivated 
 sugar by the use of slave labour, were to be diminished, but not abolished. 
 The duties on the importation of foreign cattle were to be at once removed. 
 In order to compensate the agricultural interests for the gradual withdrawal 
 of protective duties, there were to be some readjustments of local burdens. 
 We need not dwell much on this part of the explanation. We are familiar 
 in late years with the ingenious manner in which the principle of the re- 
 adjustment of local burdens is worked in the hope of conciliating the agri- 
 cultural interests. These readjustments are not usually received with any 
 great gratitude or attended by any particular success. In this instance Sir 
 Robert Peel could hardly have laid much serious stress on them. If the 
 landowners and farmers had really any just ground of complaint in the 
 abolition of protection, the salve which was applied to their wound would 
 scarcely have caused them to forget its pains. The important part of the 
 explanation, so far as history is concerned, consisted in the fact that Peel 
 proclaimed himself an absolute convert to the Free Trade principle, and 
 that the introduction of the principle into all departments of our com- 
 mercial legislation was, according to his intention, to be a mere question 
 of time and convenience. The struggle was to be between Protection and 
 Free Trade. 
 
 Not that the proposals of the Ministry wholly satisfied the professed 
 Free Traders. These latter would have enforced, if they could, an im- 
 mediate application of the principle without the interval of three years, 
 and the devices and shifts which were to be put in operation during that 
 middle time. But of course, although they pressed their protest in the 
 form of an amendment, they had no idea of not taking what they could get 
 when the amendment failed to secure the approval of the majority. The 
 Protectionist amendment amounted to a distinct proposal that the policy 
 of the Government be absolutely rejected by the House. The debate lasted 
 for twelve nights, and at the end the Protectionists had 240 votes against 
 337 given on behalf of the policy of the Government. The majority of 97 
 was not quite so large as the Government had anticipated ; and the result 
 WUH to encourage tb* Protectionists in their plans of opposition. The
 
 218 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. xvi. 
 
 ,'pportunities of obstruction were many. The majority just mentioned wae 
 merely in favour of going into committee of the whole house to considei 
 the existing Customs and Corn Acts; but every single financial scheme 
 which the minister had to propose must be introduced, debated and carried, 
 if it was to be carried, as a separate bill. We shall not ask our readers 
 to follow us into the details of these long discussions. They were not 
 important ; they were often not dignified. They more frequently con- 
 cerned themselves about the conduct and personal consistency of the 
 minister than about the merits of his policy. The arguments in favour 
 of protection, which doubtless seemed effective to the country gentlemen 
 then, seem like the prattle of children now. There were, indeed, some 
 exciting passages in the debates. For these the House was mainly indebted 
 to the rhetoric of Mr. Disraeli. That indefatigable and somewhat reckless 
 champion occupied himself with incessant attacks on the Prime Minister. 
 He described Peel as ' a trader on other people's intelligence ; a political 
 burglar of other men's ideas.' ' The occupants of the Treasury bench,' 
 he said, were ' political pedlars, who had bought their party in the cheapest 
 market and sold it in the dearest.' This was strong language. But it was 
 after all more justifiable than the attempt Mr. Disraeli made to revive an 
 old and bitter controversy between Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Cobden, which 
 for the sake of the former had better have been forgotten. Three years 
 before, Mr. Edward Drummond, private secretary of Sir Robert Peel, was 
 shot by an assassin. There could be no doubt that the victim had been 
 mistaken for the Prime Minister himself. The assassin turned out to be 
 a lunatic, and as such was found not guilty of the murder and was con- 
 signed to a lunatic asylum. The event naturally had a profound effect on 
 Sir Robert Peel, and during one of the debates on Free Trade Mr. Cobden 
 happening to say that he would hold the Prime Minister responsible foi 
 the condition of the country, Peel, in an extraordinary burst of excite- 
 ment, interpreted the words as a threat to expose him to the attack of an 
 assassin. Nothing could be more painfully absurd ; and nothing could 
 better show the unreasoning and discreditable hatred of the Tories at that 
 time for anyone who opposed the policy of Peel than the fact that they 
 actually cheered their leader again and again when he made this passionate 
 and half-frenzied charge on one of the purest and noblest men who ever 
 sat in the English Parliament. Peel soon recovered his senses. lie saw 
 the error of which he had been guilty and regretted it; and it ought to 
 have been consigned to forgetfulness; but Mr. Disraeli, in repelling a charge 
 made against him of indulging in unjustifiable personalities, revived the 
 whole story and reminded the House of Commons that the Prime Minister 
 had charged the leader of the Free Trade League with inciting assassins to
 
 ,840. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 219 
 
 murder him. This unjustifiable attempt to rekindle an old quarrel had, 
 however, no other ifFect than to draw from Sir Robert Peel a renewed 
 expression of apology for the charge he had made against Mr. Cobden, ' in 
 the course of a heated debate, when I put an erroneous construction on 
 some expressions used by the hon. member for Stockport.' Mr. Cobden 
 declared that the explanation made by Peel was entirely satisfactory, and 
 expressed his hope that no one on either side of the House would attempt 
 to revive the subject or make further allusion to it. 
 
 The Government prevailed. It would be superfluous to go into any 
 details as to the progress of the Corn Bill. Enough to say that the third 
 reading of the bill passed the House of Commons on May 15, by a majority 
 of 98 votes. The bill was at once sent up to the House of Lords, and, by 
 means chiefly of the earnest advice of the Duke of Wellington, was carried 
 through that House without much serious opposition. But June 25, the 
 day when the bill was read for a third time in the House of Lords, was a 
 memorable day in the Parliamentary annals of England. It saw the fall 
 of the Ministry who had carried to success the greatest piece of legislation 
 that had been introduced since Lord Grey's Reform Bill. 
 
 A Coercion Bill for Ireland was the measure which brought this catas- 
 trophe on the Government of Sir Robert Peel. While the Corn Bill was 
 yet passing through the House of Commons the Government felt called 
 upon, in consequence of the condition of crime and outrage in Ireland, to 
 introduce a Coercion Bill. Lord George Bentinck at first gave the measure 
 his support; but during the Whitsuntide recess he changed his views. He 
 now declared that he had only supported the bill on the assurance of the 
 Government that it was absolutely necessary for the safety of life in Ireland, 
 and that as the Government had not pressed it on in advance of every other 
 measure especially no doubt of the Corn Bill he could not believe that 
 it was really a matter of imminent necessity ; and that furthermore he had 
 no longer any confidence in the Government and could not trust them with 
 extraordinary powers. In truth the bill was placing the Government in a 
 serious difficulty. All the Irish followers of O'Connell would of course oppose 
 the coercion measure. The Whigs when out of office have usually made it a 
 rule to oppose coercion bills if they do not come accompanied with some 
 promises of legislative reform and concession. The English Radical member?, 
 Mr. Cobden and his followers, were almost sure to oppose it. Under these 
 circumstances, it seemed probable enough that if the Protectionists joined 
 with the other opponents of the Coercion Bill the Government must be 
 defeated. The temptation was too great. As Mr. Disraeli himself candidly 
 says of his party, ' vengeance had succeeded in most breasts to the more 
 anguine sentiment. The field was lost, but at any rate there should be
 
 220 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. cu.xvi. 
 
 retribution for those who had betrayed it' The question with many of the 
 indignant Protectionists was, as Mr. Disraeli himself puts it, ' How was 
 Sir Robert Peel to be turned out? ' It soon became evident that he could 
 be turned out by those who detested him and longed for vengeance voting 
 against him on the Coercion Bill. This was done. The fiercer Protec- 
 tionists voted with the Free Traders, the Whigs, and the Irish Catholic 
 and Liberal members ; and after a debate of much bitterness and passion, 
 the division on the second reading of the Coercion Bill took place on 
 Thursday, June 25, and the Ministry were left in a minority of 73. Two 
 hundred and nineteen votes only were given for the second reading of the 
 bill, and 292 against it. Some eighty of the Protectionists followed Lord 
 George Bentinck into the lobby to vote against the bill, and their votes 
 settled the question. Mr. Disraeli has given a somewhat pompous descrip- 
 tion of the scene ' as the Protectionists passed in defile before the minister 
 to the hostile lobby.' ' Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat,' cries the hero 
 of the jEneid, as he plunges his sword into the heart of his rival. ' Pro- 
 tection kills you ; not your Coercion Bill,' the irreconcilable Protectionists 
 might have said as they trooped past the minister. Chance had put within 
 their grasp the means of vengeance, and they had seized it and made suc- 
 cessful use of it. The Peel Ministry had fallen in its very hour of triumph. 
 Three days after Sir Robert Peel announced his resignation of office. 
 His speech ' was considered one of glorification and pique,' says Mr. 
 Disraeli. It does not so impress most readers. It appears to have been 
 full of dignity and of emotion, not usual with Peel, but not surely under the 
 circumstances incompatible with dignity. It contained that often-quoted 
 tribute to the services of a former opponent, in which Peel declared that 
 ' the name which ought to be, and which will be, associated with the success 
 of these measures is the name of the man who, acting, I believe, from pure 
 and disinterested motives, has advocated their cause with untiring energy 
 and with appeals to reason enforced by an eloquence the more to be 
 admired because it is unaffected and unadorned the name of Richard 
 Cobden.' An added effect was given to this well-deserved panegyric by 
 the little irregularity which the Prime Minister committed when he men- 
 tioned in debate a member by name. The closing sentence of the speech 
 was eloquent and touching. Many would censure him, Peel .said ; his 
 name would perhaps be execrated by the monopolist who would maintain 
 protection for his own individual benefit ; ' but it may be that I shall leave 
 a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in those places 
 which are the abode of men whose lot it is to labour and to earn their 
 daily bread by the sweat of their brow a name remembered with expres- 
 sions of good will when they shall recreate tlu-ir exhausted strength with
 
 1846. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 221 
 
 abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened 
 with a sense of injustice.' 
 
 The great minister fell. So great a success followed by so sudden and 
 complete a fall is hardly recorded in the Parliamentary history of our 
 modern times. Peel had crushed O'Connell and carried Free Trade, and 
 O'Connell and the Protectionists had life enough yet to pull him down. 
 He is as a conqueror who having won the great victory of his life ia 
 struck by a hostile hand in some by-way as he passes home to enjoy his 
 triumph. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, AND FOREIGN INTRIGUE. 
 
 LORD JOHN RUSSELL succeeded Sir Robert Peel as First Lord of the 
 Treasury ; Lord Palmerston became Foreign Secretary ; Sir Charles 
 Wood was Chancellor of the Exchequer ; Lord Grey took charge of the 
 Colonies ; and Sir George Grey was Home Secretary. Mr. Macauky 
 accepted the office of Paymaster-General, with a seat in the Cabinet, a 
 distinction not usually given to the occupant of that office. The Ministry 
 was not particularly strong in administrative talent. The Premier and 
 the Foreign Secretary were the only members of the Cabinet who could 
 be called statesmen of the first class ; and even Lord Palmerston had not 
 as yet won more than a somewhat doubtful kind of fame, and was looked 
 upon as a man quite as likely to do mischief as good to any Ministry of 
 which he might happen to form a part. Lord Grey then and since only 
 succeeded somehow in missing the career of a leading statesman. He had 
 great talents and some originality ; he was independent and bold. But 
 his independence degenerated too often into impracticability and even 
 eccentricity ; and he was, in fact, a politician with whom ordinary men 
 could not work. Sir Charles Wood, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 had solid sense and excellent administrative capacity, but he was about as 
 bad a public speaker as ever addressed the House of Commons. His 
 budget speeches were often made so unintelligible by defective manner 
 and delivery that they might almost as well have been spoken in a foreign 
 language. Sir George Grey was a speaker of fearful fluency, and a re- 
 spectable administrator of the second or third class. He was as plodding 
 in administration as he was precipitate of speech. 
 
 ' Peel,' wrote Lord Palmerston to a friend a short time after the for- 
 mation of the new Ministry, ' seems to have made up his mind that for a 
 year or two he cannot hope to form a party, and that he must give people
 
 222 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. xvn. 
 
 a certain time to forget the events of last year ; in the meanwhile, it is 
 evident that he does not wish that any other Government should be 
 formed out of the people on his side of the House, because of that 
 Government he would not be a member. For these reasons, and also 
 because he sincerely thinks it best that we should, for the present, remain 
 in, he gives us very cordial support, as far as he can without losing his 
 independent position. Graham, who sits up under his old pillar, and never 
 comes down to Peel's bench even for personal communication, seems to 
 keep himself aloof from everybody, and to hold himself free to act accord- 
 ing to circumstances ; but as yet he is not considered as the head of any 
 party. George Bentinck has entirely broken down as a candidate for 
 ministerial position ; and thus we are left masters of the field, not only 
 on account of our own merits, which, though we say it ourselves, are great, 
 but by virtue of the absence of any efficient competitors.' Palmerston's 
 humorous estimate of the state of affairs was accurate. The new Ministry 
 was safe enough, because there was no party in a condition to compete 
 with it. 
 
 The position of the Government of Lord John Russell was not one 
 to be envied. The Irish famine occupied all attention, and soon seemed 
 to be an evil too great for any Ministry to deal with. The failure of the 
 potato was an overwhelming disaster for a people almost wholly agricul- 
 tural arid a peasantry long accustomed to live upon that root alone. Ire- 
 land contains a very few large towns ; when the names of four or five are 
 mentioned the list is done with, and we have to come to mere villages. 
 The country has hardly any manufactures except that of linen in the 
 northern province. In the south and west the people live by agriculture 
 alone. The cottier system, which prevailed almost universally in three 
 of the four provinces, was an arrangement by which a man obtained in 
 return for his labour a right to cultivate a little patch of ground, just 
 enough to supply him with food for the scanty maintenance of his family. 
 The great landlords were for the most part absentees ; the smaller land- 
 lords were often deeply in debt, and were therefore compelled to screw 
 every possible penny of rent out of their tenants-at-will. They had not, 
 however, even that regularity and order in their exactions that might at 
 least have forced upon the tenants some habits of forethought and exact- 
 ness. There was a sort of understanding that the rent was always to be 
 somewhat in arrear ; the supposed kindness of a landlord consisted in his 
 allowing the indebtedness to increase more liberally than others of his 
 class would do. There was a demoralising slatternliness in the whole 
 system. It was almost certain that if a tenant, by greatly increased 
 industry and good fortune, made the land which ho held more valuable
 
 1845-6. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 2'JH 
 
 than before, his rent would at once be increased. On the other hand, it 
 was held an act of tyranny to dispossess him so long as he made even any 
 fair promise of paying up. There was, therefore, a thoroughly viciou* 
 system established all round, demoralising alike to the landlord and the 
 tenant. 
 
 Underlying all the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland were 
 two great facts. The occupation of land was virtually a necessity of lite 
 to the Irish tenant. That is the first fact. The second is, that the land 
 system under which Ireland was placed was one entirely foreign to the 
 traditions, the ideas, one might say the very genius of the Irish people. 
 Whether the system introduced by conquest and confiscation was bettei 
 dian the old one or not does not in the slightest degree affect the working 
 D this fact on the relations between the landlord and the tenant in Ireland. 
 No one will be able to understand the whole meaning and bearing of the 
 long land struggle in Ireland who does not clearly get into his mind the 
 fact that, rightly or wrongly, the Irish peasant regarded the right to have 
 a bit of land, his share, exactly as other peoples regard the right to live. 
 It was in his mind something elementary and self-evident. He could not 
 be loyal to, he could not even understand, any system which did not 
 secure that to him. According to Michelet, the land is the French peasant's 
 mistress. It was the Irish peasant's life. 
 
 The Irish peasant with his wife and his family lived on the potato. 
 Hardly in any country coming within the pale of civilisation was there to 
 be found a whole peasant population dependent for their living on one 
 single root. When the potato failed in 1845 the life-system of the people 
 seemed to have given way. At first it was not thought that the failure 
 must necessarily be anything more than partial. But it soon bet- an to 
 appear that for at least two seasons the whole food of the peasant ] opula- 
 tion and of the poor in towns was absolutely gone. Lord John Russell's 
 Government pottered with the difficulty rather than encountered it. In 
 their excuse it has to be said of course that the calamity they had to 
 meet was unprecedented and that it must have tried the resources of the 
 most energetic and foreseeing statesmanship. Still the fact remains that 
 the measures of the Government were at first utterly inadequate to the 
 occasion, and that afterwards some of them were even calculated to make 
 bad worse. Not a county in Ireland wholly escaped the potato disease, 
 and many of the southern and western counties were soon in actual 
 famine. A peculiar form of fever famine-fever it was called began tc 
 show itself everywhere. A terrible dysentery set in as well. In some 
 districts the people died in hundreds daily from fever, dysentery, or sheer 
 starvation. The districts of Skibbereen, Skull, Westport and other
 
 224 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. xm, 
 
 places obtained u ghastly supremacy in misery. In some of these districts 
 the parochial authorities at last declined to put the ratepayers to the 
 expense of coffins for the too frequent dead. The coroners declared it 
 impossible to keep on holding inquests. There was no time for all the 
 ceremonies of that kind that would have to be gone through if they made 
 any pretence at keeping up the system of ordinary seasons. In other 
 places where the formula was still kept up the juries added to their verdicts 
 of death by starvation some charge of wilful murder against Lord John 
 Russell or the Lord Lieutenant, or some other official whose supposed 
 neglect was set down as the cause of the death. Unfortunately, the 
 Government had to show an immense activity in the introduction of 
 Coercion Bills and other repressive measures. It would have been im- 
 possible that in such a country as Ireland a famine of that gigantic kind 
 should set in without bringing crimes of violence along with it. The 
 peasantry had always hated the land tenure system ; they had always 
 been told, not surely without justice, that it was at the bottom of all their 
 miseries ; they were now under the firm conviction that the Government 
 could have saved them if it would. What wonder then if there were 
 bread riots and agrarian disturbances ? Who can now wonder, that being 
 so, that the Government introduced exceptional measures of repression ? 
 But it certainly had a grim and a disheartening effect on the spirits of the 
 Irish people when it seemed as if the Government could only potter and 
 palter with famine, but could be earnest and energetic when devising 
 Coercion Bills. 
 
 Whatever might be said of the Government, no one could doubt the 
 good vill of the English people. In every great English community, from 
 the m tropolis downwards, subscription lists were opened and the most 
 /iberal contributions poured in. In Liverpool, for example, a great 
 number of the merchants of the place put down a thousand pounds each. 
 The Quakers of England sent over a delegation of their number to the 
 specially famine-stricken districts of Ireland to administer relief. Many 
 other sects and bodies followed the example. National Relief Associations 
 were specially formed in England. Relief indeed began to be poured in 
 from all countries. The United States employed some of their war vessels 
 to send gifts of grain and other food to the starving places. In one Irish 
 seaport the joy-bells of the town were kept ringing all day in honour of 
 the arrival of one of these grain-laden vessels a mournfully significant 
 form of rejoicing surely. One of the national writers said at the time 
 that the misery of Ireland touched ' even the heart of the Turk at the far 
 Dardanelles, and he sent her in pity the alms of a beggar.' It was true 
 lhat trom Turkey as from most other countries had come some contribution
 
 184ft-6. A HISTORY OF OUIi OWN TIMES. 225 
 
 towards the relief of Irish dietress. At the same time there were some 
 very foolish performances go no through in Dublin under the sanction and 
 patronage of the Lord Lieutenant ; the solemn ' inauguration,' as it would 
 be called by a certain class of writers now, of a public soup kitchen, 
 devised and managed by the fashionable French cook M. Soyer, for the 
 purpose of showing the Irish people what remarkably sustaining polage 
 might be made out of the thinnest and cheapest materials. This exposition 
 would have been well enough in a quiet and practical way, outperformed as a 
 grand national ceremony of regeneration, under the patronage of the Viceroy, 
 and with accompaniment of brass bands and pageantry, it had a remarkably 
 foolish and even offensive aspect. The performance was resented bitterly 
 by many of the impatient young spirits of the national party in Dublin. 
 
 Meanwhile the misery went on deepening and broadening. It was far 
 too great to be effectually encountered by subscriptions however generous ; 
 and the Government, meaning to do the best they could, were practically 
 at their wits' end. The starving peasants streamed into the nearest consider- 
 able town, hoping for relief there, and found too often that there the very 
 sources of charity were dried up. Many, very many, thus disappointed, merely 
 lay down on the pavement and died there. Along the country roads one met 
 everywhere groups of gaunt dim-eyed wretches, clad in miserable old sack ing 
 and wandering aimlessly with some vague idea of finding food, as the boy in 
 the fable hoped to find the gold where the rainbow touched the earth. Many 
 remained in their empty hovels and took death there when he came. In some 
 regions the country seemed unpeopled for miles. A fervid national writer 
 declared that the impression made on him by the aspect of the country then 
 was that of ' one silent vast dissolution.' Allowing for rhetoric, there was not 
 much exaggeration in the words. Certainly the Ireland of tradition was dis- 
 solved in the operation of that famine. The old system gave way utterly. The 
 landlordism of the days before the famine never revived in its former strength 
 and its peculiar ways. For the landlord class there came out of the famine 
 the Encumbered Estates Court ; for the small farmer and peasant class 
 there floated up the American emigrant ship. 
 
 Acts and even conspiracies of violence, as we have said, began to be 
 not uncommon throughout the country and in the cities. One peculiar 
 symptom of the time was the glass-breaking mania that set in throughout 
 the towns of the south and west. It is perhaps not quite reasonable to 
 call it a mania, for it had melancholy method in it. The workhouses were 
 overcrowded, and the authorities could not receive there or feed there one- 
 fourth of the applicants who besieged them. Suddenly it seemed to occur 
 to the minds of many of famine's victims that there were the prisons i'or 
 which one might qualify himself, and to which, after qualification, he 
 
 VOL. t. Q
 
 226 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xvn. 
 
 could not be denied admittance. The idea was simple : go into a town, 
 smash deliberately the windows of a shop, and some days of a gaol and 
 of substantial food must follow. The plan became a favourite. Especially 
 was it adopted by young girls and women. After a time the puzzled 
 magistrates resolved to put an end to this device by refusing to inflict the 
 punishment which these unfortunate creatures sought as a refuge and a 
 comfort. One early result of the famine and the general breakdown of 
 property is too significant to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Some of the 
 landlords had been living for a long time on a baseless system, on a credit 
 which the failure of the crops brought to a crushing test. Not a few of 
 these were utterly broken. They could maintain their houses and halls 
 no longer, and often were only too happy to let them to the poor law 
 guardians to be used as extra workhouses. In the near neighbourhood of 
 many a distressed country town the great house of the local magnate thus 
 became a receptacle for the pauperism which could not find a refuge in the 
 overcrowded asylums which the poor law system had already provided. 
 The lion and the lizard, says the Persian poet, keep the halls where 
 Jarnshyd gloried and drank deep. The pauper devoured his scanty dole 
 of Indian meal porridge in the hall where his landlord had gloried and 
 drunk deep. 
 
 When the famine was over and its results came to be estimated, it was 
 found that Ireland had lost about two millions of her population. She 
 had come down from eight millions to six. This was the combined effect 
 of starvation, of the various diseases that followed in its path gleaning 
 where it had failed to gather, and of emigration. Long after all the direct 
 effects of the failure of the potato had ceased, the population still continued 
 steadily to decrease. The Irish peasant had in fact had his eyes turned, 
 as Mr. Bright afterwards expressed it, towards the setting sun, and for 
 long years the stream of emigration westward never abated in its volume. 
 A new Ireland began to grow up across the Atlantic. In every great city 
 of the United States the Irish element began to form a considerable con- 
 stituent of the population. From New York to San Francisco, from St. 
 Paul, Minnesota, to New Orleans, the Irish accent is heard in every street, 
 and the Irish voter conies to the polling-booth ready, far too heedlessly, to 
 vote for any politician who will tell him that America loves the green flag 
 and hates the Saxon. 
 
 Terrible as the immediate effects of the famine were, it is impossible 
 for any friend of Ireland to say that, on the whole, it did not bring much 
 good with it. It first applied the scourge which was to drive out of the 
 land a thoroughly vicious and rotten system. It first called the attention 
 pf English statesmen irresistibly to the fact that the system was bad to its
 
 1847. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 227 
 
 heart's core, and that nothing good could conic oi'it. It roused the atten- 
 tion of the humble Irishman, too often inclined to put up with everything 
 in the lazy spirit of a Neapolitan or a fatalist, to the fact that there was for 
 him too a world elsewhere. The famine had indeed many a bloody after- 
 birth ; but it gave to the world a new Ireland. 
 
 The Government, as it may be supposed, had hard work to do all thin 
 time. They had the best intentions towards Ireland, and were always 
 indeed announcing that they had found out some new way of dealing with 
 the distress, and modifying or withdrawing old plans. They adopted 
 measures from time to time to expend large sums in something like 
 systematic employment for the poor in Ireland; they modified the Irish 
 Poor Laws ; they agreed at length to suspend temporarily the Corn Laws 
 and the Navigation Laws, so far as these related to the importation of 
 grain. A tremendous commercial panic, causing the fall of great houses, 
 especially in the corn trade, all over the country, called for the suspension 
 of the Bank Charter Act of 1844, and the measures of the ministers were 
 for the most part treated considerately and loyally by Sir Robert Peel : 
 but a new opposition had formed itself under the nominal guidance of 
 Lord George Bentinck, and the real inspiration of Mr. Disraeli. Lord 
 George Bentinck brought in a bill to make a grant of sixteen millions to 
 be expended as an advance on the construction and completion of Irish 
 railways. This proposal was naturally very welcome to many in Ireland. 
 It had a lavish and showy air about it ; and Lord George Bentinck talked 
 grandiosely in. his speech about the readiness with which he, the Saxon, 
 would, if his measure were carried, answer with his head for the loyalty 
 of the Irish people. But it soon began to appear that the scheme was not 
 so much a question of the Irish people as of certain moneyed classes who 
 might be helped along at the expense of the English and the Irish people. 
 Lord George Bentinck certainly had no other than a direct and single- 
 minded purpose to do good to Ireland ; but his measure would have been 
 a failure if it had been carried. It was fairly open in some respects to 
 the criticism of Mr. Roebuck, that it proposed to relieve Irish landlordism 
 of its responsibilities at the expense of the British taxpayer. The measure 
 was rejected. Lord George Bentinck was able to worry the Ministry 
 somewhat effectively when they introduced a measure to reduce gradually 
 the differential duties on sugar for a few years, and then replace these 
 duties by a fixed and uniform rate. This was, in short, a proposal to apply 
 the principle of Free Trade, instead of that of Protection, to sugar. The 
 protective principle had in this case, however, a certain fascination about 
 it, even for independent minds ; for an exceptional protection had been 
 retained by Sir Robert Peel in order to enable the planters in our colonies 
 
 o 2
 
 228 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xni 
 
 to compensate themselves for the loss they might suffer in the transition 
 from slavery to free labour. Lord George Bentinck therefore proposed an 
 amendment to the resolutions of the Government, declaring it unjust and 
 impolitic to reduce the duty on foreign slave-grown sugar, as tending to 
 check the advance of production by British free labour, and to 
 give a great additional stimulus to slave labour. Many sincere 
 and independent opponents of slavery, Lord Brougham in the House of 
 Lords among them, were caught by this view of the question. Lord 
 George and his brilliant lieutenant at one time appeared as if they were 
 likely to carry their point in the Commons. But it was announced that 
 if the resolutions of the Government were defeated ministers would resign, 
 and there was no one to take their place. Peel could riot return to power ; 
 and the time was far distant yet when Mr. Disraeli could form a Ministry. 
 The opposition crumbled away therefore, and the Government measures 
 were carried. Lord George Bentinck made himself for a while the 
 champion of the West India sugar-producing interest. He was a man 
 who threw himself with enormous energy into any work he undertook ; 
 and he had got up the case of the West India planters with all the 
 enthusiasm that inspired him in his more congenial pursuits as one of the 
 principal men on the turf. The alliance between him and Mr. Disraeli is 
 curious. The two men, one would think, could have had absolutely 
 nothing in common. Mr. Disraeli knew nothing about horses and racing. 
 Lord George Bentinck could not possibly have imderstood, not to say 
 sympathised with, many of the leading ideas of his lieutenant. Yet Ben- 
 tinck had evidently formed a just estimate of Disraeli's political genius ; and 
 Disraeli saw that in Bentinck were many of the special qualities which 
 go to make a powerful party leader in England. Time has amply justified, 
 Kiid more than justified, Bentinck's convictions as to Disraeli ; Bentinck'.s 
 premature death leaves Disraeli's estimate of him an untested speculation. 
 There were troubles abroad as well as at home for the Government. 
 Almost immediately on their coming into office, the project of the Spanish 
 Marriages, concocted between Louis Philippe and his minister, M. Guizot, 
 disturbed lor a time and very seriously the good understanding between 
 England and France. It might so far as this country was concerned have 
 had much graver consequences, but for the fact that it bore its bitter 
 fruits so soon for the dynasty of Louis Philippe and helped to put a new 
 ruler on the throne of France. It is only as it affected the friendly 
 feeling between this country and France that the question of the Spanish 
 marriages has a place in such a work as this ; but at one time it seemed 
 Ukely enough to bring about consequences which would link it closely and 
 directly with the history of England. The ambition of the French
 
 1846 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 229 
 
 minister and his master was to bring the throne of Spain in some way undfr 
 the direct influence of France. Such a scheme had again and again been at 
 the heart of French rulers and statesmen, and it had always failed. At 
 least, it had always brought with it jealousy, hostility and war. Louis 
 Philippe and his minister were untaught by the lessons of the past. The 
 young Queen Isabella of Spain was unmarried, and of course a hi^di 
 degree of public anxiety existed in Europe as to her choice of a husband. 
 No delusion can be more profound or more often exposed than that which 
 inspires ambitious princes and enterprising statesmen to imagine that they 
 am control nations by the influence of dynastic alliances. In every European 
 war we see princes closely connected by marriage in arms against each other. 
 The great political forces which bring nations into the field of battle are not 
 to be charmed into submission by the rubbing of a princess's wedding ring. 
 But a certain class of statesmen, a man of the order who in ordinary life 
 would be called too clever by half, is always intriguing about royal marriages,. 
 as if thus alone he could hold in his hands the destinies of nations. 
 
 In an evil hour for themselves and their fame, Louis Philippe and hia 
 minister believed that they could obtain a virtual ownership of Spain by 
 an ingenious marriage scheme. There was at one time a project talked of 
 rather than actually entertained, of marrying the young Queen of Spain 
 and her sister to the Due d'Aumale and the Due de Montpenaier, both 
 sons of Louis Philippe. But this would have been too daring a venture 
 on the part of the King of the French. Apart from any objections to be 
 entertained by other states, it was certain that England could not ' view 
 with indifference,' as the diplomatic phrase goes, the prospect of a son of 
 the French King occupying the throne of Spain. It may be said that, 
 after all, it was of little concern to England who married the Queen of 
 Spain. Spain was nothing to us. It would not follow that Spain must 
 be the tool of France because the Spanish Queen married a son of the 
 French King, any more than it was certain in a former day that Austria 
 must link herself with the fortunes of the great Napoleon because he had 
 married an Austrian princess. Probably it would have been well if Eng- 
 land had concerned herself in no wise with the domestic affairs of Spain, 
 and had allowed Louis Philippe to spin what ignoble plots he pleased, if 
 the Spanish people themselves had not wit enough to see through and 
 power enough to counteract them. At a later period Franco brought on 
 herself a terrible war and a crushing defeat because her Emperor chose 
 to believe, or allowed himself to be persuaded into believing, that the 
 security of France would be threatened if a Prussian prince were called 
 to the throne of Spain. The Prussian prince did not ascend that throne ; 
 hut the war between France and Prussia went on ; France was defeated ;
 
 230 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xvn. 
 
 and after a little the Spanish people themselves got rid of the prince whom 
 they had consented to accept in place of the obnoxious Prussian. If the 
 French Emperor had not interfered, it is only too probable that the Prus- 
 sian prince would have gone to Madrid, reigned there for a few unstable 
 and tremulous months, and then have been quietly sent back to his own 
 country. But at the time of Louis Philippe's intrigues about the Spanish 
 marriages, the statesmen of England were by no means disposed to take 
 a cool and philosophic view of things. The idea of non-intervention had 
 scarcely come up then, and the English minister who was chiefly concerned 
 in foreign affairs was about the last man in the world to admit that any- 
 thing could go on in Europe or elsewhere in which England was not en- 
 titled to express an opinion and to make her influence felt. The marriage, 
 therefore, of the young Queen of Spain had been long a subject of anxious 
 consideration in the councils of the English Government. Louis Philippe 
 knew very well that he could not venture to marry one of his sons to the 
 young Isabella. But he and his minister devised a scheme for securing 
 to themselves and their policy the same effect in another way. They con- 
 trived that the Queen and her sister should be married at the same time 
 the Queen to her cousin, Don Francisco d'Assis, Duke of Cadiz ; and 
 her sister to the Duke de Montpensier, Louis Philippe's son. There was 
 reason to expect that the Queen, if married to Don Francisco, would have 
 no children, and that the wife of Louis Philippe's son, or some of her 
 children, would come to the throne of Spain. 
 
 On the moral guilt of a plot like this it would be superfluous to dwell. 
 Nothing in the history of the perversions of human conscience and judg- 
 ment can be more extraordinary than the fact that a man like M. Guizot 
 should have been its inspiring influence. It came with a double shock 
 upon the Queen of England and her ministers, because they had every 
 reason to think that Louis Philippe had bound himself by a solemn pro- 
 mise to discourage any such policy, When the Queen paid her visit to 
 Louis Philippe at Eu, the king made the most distinct and the most spon- 
 taneous promise on the subject both to her Majesty and to Lord Aberdeen. 
 The Queen's own journal says: ' The King told Lord Aberdeen as well as 
 me he never would hear of Montpensier's marriage with the Infanta of 
 Spain which they are in a great fright about in England until it was 
 no longer a political question, which would bo when the Queen is mar- 
 ried and has children.' The King's own defence of himself afterwards, in 
 a letter intended to be a reply to one written to his daughter, the Queen 
 of the Belgians, by Queen Victoria, admits the fact. ' I shall tell you 
 precisely,' he says, ' in what consists the deviation on my side. Simply 
 in my having arranged for the marriage of the Duo do Montpensier, not
 
 I84fi. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 231 
 
 before the marriage of the Queen of Spain, for she is to be married to the 
 Due de Cadiz at the very moment when my son is married to the Infanta, 
 but before the Queen has a child. That is the whole deviation ; nothing 
 more, nothing less.' This was surely deviation enough from the King's pro- 
 mise to justify any charge of bad faith that could be made. The objection 
 of England and other Powers was from first to last an objection to any ar- 
 rangement which might leave the succession to one of Louis Philippe's 
 children or grandchildren. For this reason the King had given his word 
 to Queen Victoria that he would not hear of his son's marriage with 
 Isabella's sister until the difficulty about the succession had been removed 
 by Isabella herself being married and having a child. Such an agreement 
 was absolutely broken when the King arranged for the marriage of his 
 gon to the sister of Queen Isabella at the same time as Isabella's own 
 marriage, and when, therefore, it was not certain that the young Queen 
 woxild have any children. The political question, the question of succes- 
 sion, remained then open as before. All the objections that England and 
 other Powers had to the marriage of the Duo de Montpensier stood out as 
 strong as ever. It was a question of the birth of a child, and no child was 
 born. The breach of faith was made infinitely more grave by the fact that 
 in the public opinion of Europe Louis Philippe was set down as having 
 brought about the marriage of the Queen of Spain with her cousin Don 
 Francisco in the hope and belief that the union would be barren of issue, 
 and that the wife of his son would stand on the next step of the throne. 
 
 The excuse which Louis Philippe put forward to palliate what he 
 called his ' deviation' from the promise to the Queen was not of a nature 
 calculated to allay the ill-feeling which his policy had aroused in England. 
 He pleaded in substance that he had reason to believe in an intended piece 
 of treachery on the part of the English Government, the consequences of 
 which, if it were successful, would have been injurious to his policy, and the 
 discovery of which therefore released him from his promise. He had found 
 out, as he declared, that there was an intention on the part of England to 
 put forward as a candidate for the hand of Queen Isabella, Prince Leopold 
 of Coburg, a cousin of Prince Albert. There was so little justification for 
 any such suspicion, that it hardly seems possible a man of Louis Philippe's 
 shrewdness can really have entertained it. The English Government had 
 always steadfastly declined to give any support whatever to the candida- 
 ture of this young prince. Lord Aberdeen, who was then Foreign Secre- 
 tary, had always taken his stand on the broad principle that the marriage 
 of the Queen of Spain was the business of Isabella herself and of the 
 Spanish people, and that so long as that Queen and that people were 
 satisfied, and the interests of England were in no wise involved, the
 
 232 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xvn. 
 
 Government of Queen Victoria would interfere in no manner. The can- 
 didature of Prince Leopold had been in the first instance a project of the 
 Dowager Queen of Spain, Christina, a woman of intriguing character, on 
 whose political probity no great reliance could be placed. The English 
 Government had in the most decided and practical manner proved that 
 they took no share in the plans of Queen Christina, and had no sympathy 
 with them. But while the whole negotiations were going on, the defeat 
 of Sir Robert Peel's Ministry brought Lord Palmerston into the Foreign 
 Office in the place of Lord Aberdeen. The very name of Palmerston 
 produced on Louis Philippe and his minister the effect vulgarly said to be 
 wrought on a bull by the display of a red rag. Louis Philippe treasiired 
 in bitter memory the unexpected success which Palmerston had won from 
 him in regard to Turkey and Egypt. At that time, and especially in the 
 court of Louis Philippe, foreign politics were looked upon as the field in 
 which the ministers of great Powers contended against each other with 
 brag and trickery, and subtle arts of all kinds ; the plain principles oi 
 integrity and truthful dealing did not seem to be regarded as properly 
 belonging to the rules of the game. Louis Philippe probably believed in 
 good faith that the return of Lord Palmerston to the Foreign Office must 
 mean the renewed activity of treacherous plans against himself. This at 
 least is the only assumption on which we can explain the King's conduct, 
 if we do not wish to believe that he put forward excuses and pretexts 
 which were wilful in their falsehood. Louis Philippe seized on some 
 words in a despatch of Lord Palmerston's, in which the candidature of 
 Prince Leopold was simply mentioned as a matter of fact; declared that 
 these words showed that the English Government had at last openly 
 adopted that candidature, professed himself relieved from all previous en- 
 gagements, and at once hurried on the marriage between Queen Isabella 
 and her cousin, and that of his own son with Isabella's sister. On Octo- 
 ber 10, 1846, the double marriage took place at Madrid ; and on Feb- 
 ruary 5 following M. Guizot told the French Chambers that the Spanish 
 marriages constituted the first great thing France had accomplished com- 
 pletely single-handed in Europe since 1830. 
 
 Everyone knows what a failure this scheme proved, so far as the objects 
 of Louis Philippe and his minister were concerned. Queen Isabella had 
 children ; Montpensier's wife did not come to the throne ; and the dynasty 
 of Louis Philippe fell before long, its fall undoubtedly hastened by the 
 position of utter isolation and distrust in which it was placed by the scheme 
 of the Spanish marriages and the feelings which it provoked in Europe. 
 The fact with which we have to deal, however, is that the friendship 
 between England and France, from which so many happy results seemed
 
 1847. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 233 
 
 likely to come to Europe and the cause of free government, was necessarily 
 interrupted. It would have been impossible to trust any longer to Louis 
 Philippe. The Queen herself entered into a correspondence with his 
 daughter, the Queen of the Belgians, in which she expressed in the clearest 
 and the most emphatic manner her opinion of the treachery with which 
 England had been encountered, and suggested plainly enough her sense of 
 the moral wrong involved in such ignoble policy. The whole transaction 
 is but another and a most striking condemnation of that odious creed, for 
 a long time tolerated in statecraft, that there is one moral code for private 
 life and another for the world of politics. A man who in private affairs 
 should act as Louis Philippe and M. Guizot acted would be justly considered 
 infamous. It is impossible to suppose that M. Guizot at least could have 
 so acted in private life. M. Guizot was a Protestant of a peculiarly austere 
 type, who professed to make religious duty his guide in all things, and who 
 doubtless did make it so in all his dealings as a private citizen. But it is 
 only too evident that he believed the policy of States to allow of other prin- 
 ciples than those of Christian morality. He allowed himself to be governed 
 by the odious delusion that the interests of a State can be advanced and 
 ought to be pursued by means which an ordinary man of decent character 
 would scorn to employ for any object in private life. A man of any high 
 principle would not employ such arts in private life to save all his earthly 
 possessions and his life and the lives of his wife and children. Anyone 
 who will take the trouble to think over the whole of this plot, for it can 
 be called by no other name, over the ignoble object which it had in view, 
 the base means by which it was carried out, the ruthless disregard for the 
 inclinations, the affections, the happiness, and the morality of its prin- 
 cipal victims; and will then think of it as carried on in private life in 
 order to come at the reversion of some young and helpless girl's inheritance, 
 will perhaps find it hard to understand how the shame can be any the less 
 because the principal plotter was a king and the victims were a queen 
 and a nation. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 
 
 THE year 1848 was an era in the modern history of Europe. It was the 
 year of unfulfilled revolutions. The fall of the dynasty of Louis Philippe 
 may be said to have set the revolutionary tide flowing. The event in 
 France had long been anticipated by keen-eyed observers. There are
 
 234 iiiSTOEY OX OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xrm. 
 
 many predictions, delivered and recorded before the revolution was yet 
 near, which show that it ought not to have taken the world by surprise. 
 The reign of the Bourgeois King was unsuited in its good and in its bad 
 qualities alike to the genius and the temper of the French people. The 
 people of France have defects enough which friends and enemies are ready 
 to point out to them ; but it can hardly be denied that they like at least 
 the appearance of a certain splendour and magnanimity in their systems 
 of government. This is indeed one of their weaknesses. It lays them 
 open to the allurements of any brilliant adventurer, like the First Napoleon 
 or the Third, who can promise them national greatness and glory at the ex- 
 pense perhaps of domestic liberty. But it makes them peculiarly intole- 
 rant of anything mean and sordid in a system or a ruler. There are 
 peoples no doubt who could be persuaded, and wisely persuaded, to put up 
 with a good deal of the ignoble and the shabby in their foreign policy for 
 the sake of domestic comfort and tranquillity. But the French people are 
 always impatient of anything like meanness in their rulers, and the govern- 
 ment of Louis Philippe was especially mean. Its foreign policy was treach- 
 erous ; its diplomatists were commissioned to act as tricksters ; the word 
 of a French minister at a foreign court began to be regarded as on a level 
 of credibility with a dicer's oath. The home policy of the King was narrow- 
 minded and repressive enough ; but a man who played upon the national 
 weakness more wisely might have persuaded his people to be content with 
 defects at home for the sake of prestige abroad. From the hour when 
 it became apparent in France that the nation was not respected abroad, 
 the fall of the dynasty was only a matter of time and change. The 
 terrible story of the de Praslin family helped to bring about the catas- 
 trophe ; the alternate weakness and obstinacy of the Government forced it 
 on ; and the King's own lack of decision made it impossible that when the 
 trial had come it could end in any way but one. 
 
 Louis Philippe iled to England, and his flight was the signal for long 
 pent-up fires to break out all over Europe. Revolution soon was aflame 
 over nearly all the courts and capitals of the Continent. Revolution 
 is like an epidemic ; it finds out the weak places in systems. The two 
 European countries which being tried by it stood it best were England 
 and Belgium. In the latter country the king made frank appeal to his 
 people, and told them that if (hey wished to be rid of him he was quite 
 willing to go. Language of this kind is new in the mouths of sovereigns; 
 and the Belgians arc. a people woll able to appreciate it. They declared 
 for their King, and the shock of the revolution passed harmlessly away, 
 in England and Ireland the effect of the events in France was instantly 
 made manifest. The Chartist agitation, which had been much encouraged 
 by the triumphant return of Feargiis O'Connor for Nottingham :it tho
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 23.') 
 
 general election of 1847, at once came to a head. Some of the Chartist 
 leaders called out for the dismissal of the Ministry, the dissolution of 
 Parliament, the Charter and ' no surrender.' A national convention 
 of Chartists began its sittings in London to arrange for a monster de- 
 monstration on April 10. Some of the speakers openly declared that the 
 people were now quite ready to fight for their Charter. Others, more 
 cautious, advised that no step should be taken against the law until at 
 least it was quite certain that the people were stronger than the upholders 
 of the existing laws. Nearly all the leading Chartists spoke of the revolu- 
 lution in France as an example offered in good time to the English people; 
 and it is somewhat curious to observe how it was assumed in the most 
 evident good faith that what we may call the wage-receiving portion ol 
 the population of these islands constitutes exclusively the English people. 
 What the educated, the wealthy, the owners of land, the proprietors of 
 factories, the ministers of the different denominations, the authors of 
 books, the painters of pictures, the bench, the bar, the army, the navy, 
 the medical profession what all these or any of them might think with 
 regard to any proposed constitutional changes was accounted a matter in 
 no wise affecting the resolve of the English ' people.' The moderate men 
 among the Chartists themselves were soon unable to secure a hearing ; 
 and the word of order went round among the body, that ' the English 
 people ' must have the Charter or a Republic. What had been done in 
 France enthusiasts fancied might well be done in England. 
 
 It was determined to present a monster petition to the House of Com- 
 mons demanding the Charter, and in fact offering a last chance to Parlia- 
 ment to yield quietly to the demand. The petition was to be presented 
 by a deputation who were to be conducted by a vast procession up to the 
 doors of the House. The procession was to be formed on Kennington 
 Common, the space then unenclosed which is now Kennington Park, on 
 the south side of London. There the Charfists were to be addressed by 
 their still trusted leader Feargus O'Connor, and they were to inarch in 
 military order to present their petition. The object undoubtedly was to 
 make such a parade of physical force as should overawe the Legislature and 
 the Government, and demonstrate the impossibility of refusing a demand 
 backed by such a reserve of power. The idea was taken from O'Connell'a 
 policy in the monster meetings; but there were many of the Chartists 
 who hoped for something more than a mere demonstration of physical force, 
 and who would have been heartily glad if some untimely or unreasonable 
 interference on the part of the authorities had led to a collision. A strong 
 faith still survived at that day in what was grandiosely called the might 
 of earnest numbers. Ardent youne; Chartists who belonged to the time 
 
 J J 
 
 of lii'e when everything seem^ possible t> the brave and faithful, and when
 
 236 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XYIM. 
 
 facts and examples count for nothing unless they favour one's own views, 
 fully believed that it needed but the firing of the first shot, ' the sparkle 
 of the first sword drawn,' to give success to the arms, though but the bare 
 arms, of the people, and to inaugurate the reign of Liberty. Therefore, 
 however differently and harmlessly events may have turned out, we may be 
 certain that there went to the rendezvous at Kennington Common on that 
 tenth of April many hundreds of ignorant and excitable young men, who 
 desired nothing so much as a collision with the police and the military, 
 and the reign of liberty to follow. The proposed procession was declared 
 illegal, and all peaceful and loyal subjects were warned not to take any 
 part in it. But this was exactly what the more ardent among the Chart- 
 ists expected and desired to see. They were rejoiced that the Government 
 had proclaimed the procession unlawful. Was not that the proper occa- 
 sion for resolute patriots to show that they represented a cause above 
 despotic law ? Was not that the very opportunity offered to them to prove 
 that the people were more mighty than their rulers, and that the rulers 
 rrmst obey or abdicate ? Was not the whole sequence of proceedings thus 
 far exactly after the pattern of the French Revolution ? The people resolve 
 that they will have a certain demonstration in a certain way ; the oligarchical 
 Government declare that they shall not do so ; the people persevere 1 , and of 
 course the next thing must be that the Government falls, exactly as in Pari.s. 
 When poor Dick Swiveller in Dickens's story is recovering from his fever, he 
 looks forth from his miserable bed and makes up his mind that he is under 
 the influence of some such magic spell as he has become familiar with in 
 the ' Arabian Nights.' His poverty-stricken little nurse chips her thin 
 hands -with joy to see him alive ; and Dick makes up his mind that the clap- 
 ping of the hands is the sign understood of all Avho read Eastern romance, 
 and that next must appear at the princess's summons the row of slaves 
 with jars of jewels on their heads. Poor Dick, reasoning from his ex- 
 periences in the 'Arabian Nights,' Avas not one whit more astray than 
 enthusiastic Chartists reasoning for the sequence of English politics from 
 the evidence of what had happened in France. The slaves with the jars of 
 .ewels on their heads were just as likely to follow the clap of the poor 
 girl's hands, as the events that had followed a popular demonstration in Paris 
 to follow a popular demonstration in London. To begin with, the Chartists 
 did not represent any such power in London as the Liberal deputies of 
 the French Chamber did in Paris. In the next place, London does not 
 govern England, and in our time at least never did. In the third place, 
 the English Government knew perfectly well that they were strong in tha 
 general support of the nation, and were not likely to yield for a single 
 to the hesitation which sealed the fate of the French monarchy.
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 23? 
 
 The Chartists fell to disputing among themselves very much as O'Con- 
 nelPs Repealers had done. Some were for disobeying the orders of the 
 authorities and having the procession, and provoking rather than avoiding 
 a collision. At a meeting of the Chartist Convention held the night 
 before the demonstration, ' the eve of Liberty,' as some of the orators 
 eloquently termed it, a considerable number were for going armed to Keri- 
 nington Common. Feargus O'Connor had, however, sense enough still left 
 to throw the weight of his influence against such an insane proceeding, and 
 to insist that the demonstration must show itself to be, as it was from the 
 first proclaimed to be, a strictly pacific proceeding. This was the parting 
 of the ways in the Chartist, as it had been in the Repeal agitation. The 
 more ardent spirits at once withdrew from the organisation. Those who 
 might even at the very last have done mischief if they had remained part 
 of the movement withdrew from it ; and Chartism was left to be repre- 
 sented by an open-air meeting and a petition to Parliament, like all the 
 other demonstrations that the metropolis had seen to pass, hardly heeded, 
 across the field of politics. But the public at large was not aware that 
 the fangs of Chartism had been drawn before it was let loose to play on 
 Kennington Common that memorable tenth of April. London awoke in 
 great alarm that day. The Chartists in their most sanguine momenta 
 never ascribed to themselves half the strength that honest alarmists of the 
 bourgeois class were ready that morning to ascribe to them. The wildest 
 rumours were spread aboad in many parts of the metropolis. Long before 
 the Chartists had got together on Kennington Common at all, various remote 
 quarters of London were filled with horrifying reports of encounters between 
 the insurgents and the police or the military, in which the Chartists in- 
 variably had the better, and as a result of which they were marching in 
 full force to the particular district where the momentary panic prevailed 
 London is worse off than most cities in such a time of alarm. It is toe 
 large for true accounts of things rapidly to diffuse themselves. In April, 
 184H, the street telegraph was not in use for carrying news through cities, 
 and the rapidly succeeding editions of the cheap papers were as yet un- 
 known. In various quarters of London, therefore, the citizen was left 
 through the greater part of the day to all the agonies of doubt and un- 
 certainty. 
 
 There was no lack, however, of public precautions against an outbreak 
 of armed Chartism. The Duke of Wellington took charge of all thr 
 arrangements for guarding the public buildings and defending the metro- 
 polis generally. He acted with extreme caution, and told several influential 
 persons that the troops were in readiness everywhere, but that they would 
 uot be seen unless an occasion actually rose for calling on their services.
 
 238 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvin 
 
 The coolness and presence of mind of the stern old soldier are well illus- 
 trated in the fact that to several persons of influence and authority who 
 came to him Avith suggestions for the defence of this place or that, his 
 almost invariable answer was ' done already,' or ' done two hours ago,' or 
 something of the kind. A vast number of Londoners enrolled themselves 
 as special constables for the maintenance of law and order. Nearly two 
 hundred thousand persons, it is said, were sworn in for this purpose ; and 
 it will always be told as an odd incident of that famous scare, that the 
 Prince Louis Napoleon, then living in London, was one of those who 
 volunteered to bear arms in the preservation of order. Not a long time 
 was to pass away before the most lawless outrage on the order and life of 
 a peaceful city was to be perpetrated by the special command of the man 
 who was so ready to lend the saving aid of hi.s constable's staff to protect 
 English society against some poor hundreds or thousands of P^nglish working 
 men. 
 
 The crisis, however, luckily proved not to stand in need of such saviours 
 of society. The Chartist demonstration was a Avretehed failure. The 
 separation of the Chartists who wanted force from those who wanted 
 orderly proceedings reduced the project to nothing. The meeting on 
 Kennington Common, so far from being a gathering of half a million of 
 men, was not a larger concourse than a temperance demonstration had often 
 drawn together on the same spot. Some twenty or twenty-five thousand 
 persons were on Kennington Common, of whom at least half were said to 
 be mere lookers-on, come to see what was to happen, and caring nothing 
 whatever about the People's Charter. The procession was riot formed, 
 O'Connor himself strongly insisting on obedience to the orders of the 
 authorities. There were speeches of the usual kind by O'Connor and 
 others ; and the opportunity was made available by some of the more ex- 
 treme and consequently disappointed Chartists to express, in very vehement 
 language, their not unreasonable conviction that the leaders of the conven- 
 tion were humbugs. The whole affair in truth was an absurd anachronism. 
 The lovers of law and order could have desired nothing better than that it 
 should thus come forth in the light of day and show itself. The clap of the 
 hand was given, but the slaves with the jars of jewels did not appear. It 
 is not that the demands of the Chartists were anachronisms or absurdities. 
 We have already shown that many of them were just and reasonable, and 
 that all came within the fair scope of political argument. The anachronism 
 was in the idea that the display of physical force could any longer be needed 
 or be allowed to settle a political controversy in England. The absurdity 
 was in the notion that the wage-receiving classes, and they alone, are 'the 
 people of England.'
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 The great Chartist petition itself, which was to have made so profound 
 an impression on the House of Commons, proved as utter a failure as the 
 demonstration on Kennington Common. Mr. O'Connor in presenting this 
 portentous document boasted that it would be found to have five million 
 seven hundred thousand signatures in round numbers. The calculation 
 was made in very round numbers indeed. The Committee on Public 
 Petitions were requested to make a minute examination of the document 
 and to report to the House of Commons. The committee called in the 
 services of a little army of law -stationers' clerks, and went to work to 
 analyse the signatures. They found, to begin with, that the whole number 
 of signatures, genuine or otherwise, fell short of two millions. But that 
 was not all. The committee found in many cases that whole sheets of the 
 petition were signed by the one hand, and that eight per cent, of the signa- 
 tures were those of women. It did not need much investigation to prove 
 that a large proportion of the signatures were not genuine. The name of 
 the Queen, of Prince Albert, of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, 
 Lord John Russell, Colonel Sibthorp, and various other public personages, 
 appeared again and again on the Chartist roll. Some of these eminent 
 persons would appear to have carried their zeal for the People's Charter so 
 far as to keep signing their names untiringly all over the petition. A large 
 number of yet stranger allies would seem to have been drawn to the cause 
 of the Charter. ' Cheeks the Marine ' was a personage very familiar at that 
 time to the readers of Captain Marryat's sea stories ; and the name of that 
 mythical hero appeared with bewildering iteration in the petition. So did 
 ' Davy Jones , ' so did various persons describing themselves as Pugnose, 
 Flatnose, Wooden-legs, and by other such epithets acknowledging curious 
 personal defects. We need not describe the laughter and scorn which 
 these revelations produced. There really was not anything very marvel- 
 lous in the discovery. The petition was got up in great haste, and with 
 almost utter carelessness. Its sheets used to be sent anywhere, and left 
 lying about anywhere, on a chance of obtaining signatures. The tempta- 
 tion to schoolboys and practical jokers of all kinds was irresistible. 
 Wherever there was a mischievous hand that could get hold of a pen, 
 there was some name of a royal personage or some Cheeks the Marine at 
 once added to the muster-roll of the Chartists. As a matter of fact, almost 
 all large popular petitions are found to have some such buffooneries mixed 
 up with their serious business. The Committee on Petitions have on 
 several occasions had reason to draw attention to the obviously fictitious 
 nature of signatures appended to such documents. The petitions in favour 
 of O'Connell's movement used to lie at the doors of chapels all the Sunday 
 lonjz, in Ireland, with pen and ink ready for all who approved to sign ; 'iiid
 
 240 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TJMES. CH. xvin. 
 
 it was many a time the favourite amusement of schoolboys to scrawl down 
 the most grotesque names and nonsensical imitations of names. But the 
 Chartist petition had been so loudly boasted of, and the whole Chartist 
 movement had created such a scare, that the delight o the public generally 
 at any discovery that threw both into ridicule was overwhelming. It was 
 made certain that the number of genuine signatures was ridiculously below 
 the estimate formed by the Chartist leaders ; and the agitation after terrify- 
 ing respectability for a long time suddenly showed itself as a thing only to 
 be laughed at. The laughter was stentorian and overwhelming. The 
 very fact that the petition contained so many absurdities was in itself an 
 evidence of the sincerity of those who presented it. It was not likely that 
 they would have furnished their enemies with so easy and tempting a way 
 of turning them into ridicule, if they had known or suspected that there 
 was any lack of genuineness in the signatures, or that they would have 
 provided so ready a means of decrying their truthfulness as to claim five 
 millions of names for a document which they knew to have less than two 
 millions. The Chartist leaders in all their doings showed a want of accurate 
 calculation, and of the frame of mind which desires or appreciates such 
 accuracy. The famous petition was only one other example of their habitual 
 weakness. It did not bear testimony against their good faith. 
 
 The effect, however, of this unlucky petition on the English public 
 mind was decisive. From that day Chartism never presented itself to 
 the ordinary middle-class Englishman as anything but an object of ridi- 
 cule. The terror of the agitation was gone. There were efforts made 
 again and again during the year by some of the more earnest and extreme 
 of the Chartist leaders to renew the strength of the agitation. The out- 
 break of the Young Ireland movement found many sympathisers among 
 the English Chartists, more especially in its earlier stages ; and some of 
 the Chartists in London and other great English cities endeavoured to 
 light up the fire of their agitation again by the help of some brands 
 caught up from the pile of disaffection which Mitchel and Meagher were 
 setting ablaze in Dublin. A monster gathering of Chartists was an- 
 nounced for Whit-Monday, June 12, and again the metropolis was thrown 
 into a momentary alarm, very different in strength however from that of 
 the famous 10th of April. Again precautions were taken by the military 
 authorities against the possible rising of an insurrectionary mob. Nothing 
 came of this last gasp of Chartism. The Times of the following day 
 remarked that there was absolutely nothing to record, ' nothing except 
 the blankest expectation, the most miserable gaping, gossiping, and grum- 
 bling of disappointed listeners; the standing about, the roaming to and 
 the dispersing and the sneaking home of some poor simpletons who
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 241 
 
 had wandered forth in the hope of some miraculous crisis in their affairs.' 
 It is impossible not to pity those who were thus deceived ; not to feel 
 oome regret for the earnestness, the hope, the ignorant passionate energy 
 which wore thrown away. 
 
 Nor can we feel only surprise and contempt for those who imagined 
 that the Charter and the rule of what was called in their jargon ' the 
 people ' would do something to regenerate their miserable lot. They had at 
 least seen that up to that time Parliament had done little for them. 
 There had been a Parliament of aristocrats and landlords, and it had for 
 generations troubled itself little about the class from whom Chartism was 
 recruited. The sceptre of legislative power had passed into the hands of 
 a Parliament made up in great measure of the wealthy middle ranks, and 
 it had thus far shown no inclination to distress itself over much about 
 them. Almost every single measure Parliament has passed to do any 
 good for the wage-receiving classes and the poor generally has been 
 passed since the time when the Chartists began to be a power. Our Corn 
 Laws repeal, our factory acts, our sanitary legislation, our measures re- 
 ferring to the homes of the poor all these have been the work of later 
 times than those which engendered the Chartist movement. It is easy to 
 imagine a Chartist replying in the early days of the movement to some 
 grave remonstrances from wise legislators. He might say, ' You tell me 
 I am mad to think the Charter can do anything for me and my class. 
 But can you tell me what else ever has done, or tried to do, any good for 
 them ? You think I am a crazy person because I believe that a popular 
 Parliament could make anything of the task of government. I ask you 
 what have you and your like made of it already ? Things are well 
 enough no doubt for you and your class, a pitiful minority ; but they 
 could not be any worse for us, and we might make them better so far as 
 the great majority are concerned. We may fairly crave a trial for our 
 experiment. No matter how wild and absurd it may seem, it could not 
 turn out, for the majority, any worse than your scheme has done.' It 
 would not have been very easy then to answer a speaker who took this 
 line of argument. In truth, there was, as we have already insisted, 
 grievance enough to excuse the Chartist agitation, and hope enough in 
 the scheme the Chartists proposed to warrant its lair discussion. Such 
 movements are never to be regarded by sensible persons as the work 
 merely of knaves and dupes. 
 
 Chartism bubbled and sputtered a little yet in some of the provincia- 
 toAvns and even in London. There were; Chartist riots in Ash ton, Lan- 
 cashire, and an affray with the police and the killing, before the affray, 
 it is painful to have to say, of one policeman. There were Chartists 
 
 VOL. I. it
 
 242 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. XVHI. 
 
 arrested in Manchester on the charge of preparing insurrectionary move- 
 ments. In two or three public-houses in London some Chartist juntas 
 were arrested, and the police believed they had got evidence of a projected 
 rising to take in the whole of the metropolis. It is not impossible that 
 some wild and frantic schemes of the kind were talked of and partly 
 hatched by some of the disappointed fanatics of the movement. Some of 
 them were fiery and ignorant enough for anything ; and throughout this 
 memorable year thrones and systems kept toppling down all over Europe 
 in a manner that might -.veil have led feather-headed agitators to fancy 
 that nothing was stable, and that in England too the whistle of a few 
 conspirators might bring about a transformation scene. All this folly 
 came to nothing but a few arrests and a few not heavy sentences. Among 
 those tried in London on charges of sedition merely, was Mr. Ernest 
 Jones, who was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Mr. Jones has 
 been already spoken of as a man of position and of high culture ; a poet 
 whose verses sometimes might almost claim for their author the possession 
 of genius. He was an orator whose speeches then and after obtained the 
 enthusiastic admiration of John Bright. He belonged rather to the school 
 of revolutionist which established itself as Young Ireland than to the 
 class of the poor Fussells and Cuffeys and uneducated working men who 
 made up the foremost ranks of the aggressive Chartist movement in its 
 later period. He might have had a brilliant and a useful career. lie 
 outlived the Chartist era ; lived to return to peaceful agitation, to hold 
 public controversy with the eccentric and clever Professor Blackie, of 
 Edinburgh, on the relative advantages of republicanism and monarchy, 
 and to stand for a Parliamentary borough at the general election of 18GS ; 
 and then his career was closed by death. The close was sadly premature 
 even then. He had plunged immaturely into politics, and although a 
 whole generation had passed away since his debut, he was but a young 
 man comparatively when the last scene came. 
 
 Here conies, not inappropriately, to an end the history of English 
 Chartism. It died of publicity ; of exposure to the air ; of the Anti- 
 Corn Law League ; of the evident tendency of the time to settle all 
 questions by reason, argument, and majorities ; of growing education ; of 
 a strengthening sense of duty among all the more influential classes. 
 When Sir John Campbell spoke its obituary years before, as we have 
 seen, he treated it as simply a monster killed by the just severity of the 
 law. Ten years' experience taught the English public to be wiser than 
 Sir John Campbell. Chartism did not die of its own excesses; it became 
 an anachronism ; no one wanted it, any more. All that was pound in its 
 claims asserted itself and was in time conceded. But its active or aggres- 
 sive influence ceased with 1818. The history of tin: rci^a of t^ueen
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUH OWN TIMES. 243 
 
 Victoria has not any further to concern itself about Chartism. Not since 
 that year has there been serious talk or thought of any agitation asserting 
 its claims by the use or even the display of armed force in England. 
 
 The spirit of the time had meanwhile made itself felt in a different 
 way in Ireland. For some months before the beginning of the year the 
 Young Ireland party had been established as a rival association to the Ke- 
 pealers who still believed in the policy of O'Connell. It was inevitable 
 that O'Connell's agitation should beget some such movement. The great 
 agitator had brought the temperament of the younger men of his partv 
 up to a fever heat, and it was out of the question that all that heat should 
 subside in the veins of young collegians and schoolboys at the precise 
 moment when the leader found that he had been going too far and gave 
 the word for peace and retreat. The influence of O'Connell had been 
 waning for a time before his death. It was a personal influence depend- 
 ing on his eloquence and his power, and these of course had gone down 
 with his physical decay. The Nation newspaper was conducted and 
 written for by some rising young men of high culture and remarkable 
 talent. It was inspired in the beginning by at least one genuine poet, Mr. 
 Thomas Davis, who unfortunately died in his yotith. It had long been 
 writing in a style of romantic and sentimental nationalism, which could 
 hardly give much satisfaction to or derive much satisfaction from the 
 somewhat cunning and trickish agitation which O'Connell had set going. 
 The Nation and the clever youths who wrote for it were all for 
 nationalism of the Hellenic or French type, and were disposed to laugh 
 at constitutional agitation, and to chafe against the influence of the 
 priests. The famine had created an immense amount of unreason- 
 able but certainly not unnatural indignation against the Government, 
 who were accused of having paltered with the agony and danger of 
 the time, and having clung to the letter of the doctrines of political 
 economy when death was invading Ireland in full force. The Young 
 Ireland party had received a new support by the adhesion of Mr. William 
 Smith O'Brien to their ranks. Mr. O'Brien was a man of considerable 
 influence in Ireland. He had large property and high rank. He was 
 connected with or related to many aristocratic families. His brother was 
 Lord Inchiquin ; the title of the marqutsate of Thomond was in the 
 family. He was undoubtedly descended from the famous Irish hero and 
 king Brian Boru, and was almost inordinately proud of his claims of 
 long descent. He had the highest personal character and the finest sense 
 of honour ; but his capacity for leadership of any movement was very 
 slender. A poor speaker, with little more than an ordinary country 
 gentleman's share of intellect, O'Brien was a well-meaning but weak and 
 vain man, whose head at last became almost turned by the homage whirl) 
 
 H ?,
 
 244 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvin. 
 
 lus followers and the Irish people generally paid to him. He was in short 
 a sort of Lafayette manque; under the happiest auspices he could never 
 have been more than a successful Lafayette. But his adhesion to the 
 cause of Young Ireland gave the movement a decided impulse. Hit 
 rank, his legendary descent, his undoubted chivalry of character and 
 purity of purpose lent a romantic interest to his appearance as the recog- 
 nised leader, or at least the figure-head, of the Young Irelanders. 
 
 Smith O'Brien was a man of more mature years than most of his 
 companions in the movement. He was some forty- three or four years of 
 age when he took the leadership of the movement. Thomas Francis 
 Meagher, the most brilliant orator of the party, a man who under other 
 conditions might have risen to great distinction in public life, was then 
 only about two or three and twenty. Mitchel and Duffy, who were 
 regarded as elders among the Young Irelanders, were perhaps each some 
 thirty years of age. There were many men more or less prominent in 
 the movement who were still younger than Meagher. One of these, who 
 afterwards rose to some distinction in America, and is long since dead, 
 wrote a poem about the time when the Young Ireland movement was at 
 its height, in which he commemorated sadly his attainment of his eighteenth 
 year, and deplored that at an age when Chatterton was mighty and Keats 
 had glimpses into spirit-land the age of eighteen, to wit he, this young 
 Irish patriot, had yet accomplished nothing for his native country. Most 
 of his companions sympathised fully with him and thought his impatience 
 natural and reasonable. The Young Ireland agitation was at first a sort 
 of college debating society movement, and it never became really national. 
 It was composed for the most part of young journalists, young scholars, 
 amateur litterateurs, poets en herbe, orators moulded on the finest patterns 
 of Athens and the French Revolution, and aspiring youths of the Cherubino 
 time of life, who were ambitious of distinction as heroes in the eyes of 
 young ladies. Among the recognised leaders of the party there was hardly 
 one in want of money. Some of them were young men of fortune, or at 
 least the sons of wealthy parents. Not many of the dangerous revolu- 
 tionary elements were to be found among these clever, respectable, and 
 precocious youths. The Young Ireland movement was as absolutely 
 unlike the Chartist movement, in England as any political agitation could 
 be unlike another. Unreal and unlucky as the Chartist movement 
 proved to be, its ranks were recruited by genuine passion and genuine 
 misery. 
 
 Before the death of O'Connell the formal secession of the Young 
 Ireland party from the regular Repealers had taken place. It arose out 
 of an attempt of O'Connell to force upon the whole body a declaration
 
 1848 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 245 
 
 condemning the use of physical force of the sword, as it wan grandiosely 
 called in any patriotic movement whatever. Jt was in itself a sign ol 
 O'Connell's failing powers and judgment that he expected to get a body 
 of men about the age of Meaghcr to make a formal declaration against 
 the weapon of Lconidas and Miltiades and all the other heroes dear to 
 classically-instructed youth. Meagher declaimed against the idea in a 
 burst ol' poetic rhetoric which made his followers believe that a new 
 Grattan of bolder style was coming up to recall the manhood of Ireland 
 that had been banished by the agitation of O'Connell and the priests 
 ' I am not one of those tame moralists,' the young orator exclaimed, 
 
 ' who say that liberty is not worth one drop o blood Against 
 
 this miserable maxim the noblest virtue that has saved and sanctified 
 humanity appears in judgment. From the blue waters of the Bay of 
 Salamis; from the valley over which the sun stood still and lit the 
 Israelite to victory; from the cathedral in which the sword of Poland has 
 been sheathed in the shroud of Kosciusko ; from the coiiA'cnt of St. Isidore 
 where the fiery hand that rent the ensign of St. George upon the plains of 
 Ulster has moulded into dust; from the sands of the desert where the 
 wild genius of the Algeriric so long has scared the eagle of the Pyrenees ; 
 from the ducal palace in this kingdom where the memory of the gallant 
 and seditious Geraldine enhances more than royal favour the splendour of 
 his race ; from the solitary grave within this mute city which a dying 
 bequest has left without an epitaph oh ! from every spot where heroism 
 has had a sacrifice or a triumph, a voice breaks in upon the cringing crowd 
 that cherishes this maxim, crying, Away with it away -with it ! ' 
 
 The reader will probably think that a generation of young men might 
 have enjoyed as much as they could get of this sparkling declamation 
 without much harm being done thereby to the cause of order. Only a 
 crowd of well-educated young Irishmen fresh from college, and with the 
 teaching of their country's history which the Nation was pouring out 
 weekly in prose and poetry, could possibly have understood all its his- 
 torical allusions. No harm, indeed, would have come of this graceful and 
 poetic movement were it not for events which the Young Ireland party 
 had no share in bringing about. 
 
 The Continental revolutions of the year 1848 suddenly converted the 
 movement from a literary and poetical organisation into a rebellious con- 
 spiracy. The fever of that wild epoch spread itself at once over Ireland. 
 When crowns were going down everywhere, what wonder if Hellenic 
 Young Irelandism believed that the moment had come when the crown ot 
 the Saxon invader too was destined to fall ? The French Revolution and 
 the flight of Louis Philippe set Ireland in a rapture of hope and rebellious
 
 246 A HIS.TOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvm. 
 
 joy. Lainartine became the hero of the hour. A copy of his showy, 
 superficial ' Girondists ' was in the hand of every true Young Jrelander. 
 Meagher was at once declared to be the Vergniaud of the Irish revolution. 
 Smith O'Brien was called upon to become its Lafayette. A deputation of 
 Young Inlanders, with O'Brien and Meagher at their head, waited 
 upon Lainartine, and were received by him with a cool good sense which 
 made Englishmen greatly respect his judgment and prudence, but which 
 much disconcerted the hopes of the Young Irelanders. Many of these 
 latter appear to have taken in their most literal .sense some words of 
 Lamartine's about the sympathy of the new French Republic with the 
 struggles of oppressed nationalities, and to have fancied that the Republic 
 would seriously consider the propriety of going to war with England at 
 the request of a few young men from Ireland, headed by a country gentle- 
 man and member of Parliament. In the meantime a fresher and a 
 stronger influence than that of O'Brien or Meagher had arisen in Young 
 Irelandism. Young Ireland itself now split into two sections : one for 
 immediate action, the other for caution and delay. The party of action 
 acknowledged the leadership of John Mitch el. The organ of this section 
 was the newspaper started by Mitchel in opposition to the Nation, which 
 had grown too slow for him. The new journal was called the United 
 Irishman, and in a short time it had completely distanced the Nat tun in 
 popularity and in circulation. The deliberate policy of the United 
 Irishman was to force the hand first of the Government and then of the 
 Irish people. Mitchel had made up his mind so to rouse the passion ol 
 the people as to compel the Government to take steps for the prevention 
 of rebellion by the arrest of some of the leaders. Then Mitchel calcu- 
 lated upon the populace rising to defend or rescue their heroes and then 
 the game would be afoot ; Ireland would be entered in rebellion ; and 
 the rest would be lor fate to decide. 
 
 This looks now a very wild and hopeless scheme. So of course it 
 proved itself to be. But it did not appear so hopeless at the time, even 
 to cool heads. At least it may be called the only scheme which had the 
 slightest chance of success; we do not say of success in establishing the 
 independence of Ireland, which Mitchel sought lor, but in setting a genuine 
 rebellion afoot. Mitchel was the one formidable man among the rebels 
 of '48. Ke was the one man who distinctly knew what lie wanted, and 
 was prepared to run any risk to get it. He was cast in the very mould of 
 the genuine revolutionist, and under different circumstances might have 
 played a formidable part. lie carm- from the northern part of the island, 
 and was a Protestant Dissenter. It, is a fact worthy of note that all the 
 really formidable rebels Ireland lias uroduced in modern times., from
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIM IIS. 247 
 
 Wolfe Tune to Mitehel, have been Protestants. Mitehc. was ;i man of 
 great literary talent; indeed a man of something like genius. Ilj wrote 
 a clear, bold, incisive prose, keen in its scorn and satire, going directly to 
 the heart of its purpose. As mere prose some of it is worth reading even 
 to-day lor its cutting force and pitiless irony. Mitchcl issued in his paper 
 week after week a challenge to the Government to prosecute him. lie 
 poured out the most iiery sedition, and used every incentive that words 
 could supply to rouse a hot-headed people to arms or an impatient 
 Government to some act of severe repression. Mitchel was quite midy 
 to make a sacrifice of himself if it were necessary. It is possible enough 
 that he had persuaded himself into the belief that a rising in Ireland 
 against the Government might be successful. But there is good reason 
 to think that he would have been quite satisfied if he could have stirred 
 up by any process a genuine and sanguinary insurrection, which would 
 have read well in the papers and redeemed the Irish Nationalists from 
 what he considered the disgrace of never having shown that they knew 
 how to die for their cause. lie kept on urging the people to prepare for 
 warlike effort, and every week's United Irishman contained long descrip- 
 tions of how to make pikes and how to use them ; how to cast bullets, 
 how to make the streets as dangerous for the hoofs of cavalry horses as 
 Bruce made the field of Bannockburn. Some of the recipes, if we may 
 call them so, were of a peculiarly ferocious kind. The use of vitriol was 
 recommended among other destructive agencies. A feeling of detestation 
 was not unnaturally aroused against Mitcliel, even in the minds of many 
 who sympathised Avith his general opinions; and those whom we may call 
 the Girondists of the party somewhat shrank from him and would gladly 
 have been rid of him. It is true that the most ferocious of these vitriolic 
 articles were not written b}' him ; nor did he know of the famous recom- 
 mendation about the throwing of vitriol until it appeared in print. He 
 \vas, however, justly and properly as well as technically responsible for 
 all that appeared in a paper started with such a purpose as that of the 
 United Irishman, and it is not even certain that he would have disapproved 
 of the vitriol-throwing recommendation if he had known of it in time, 
 lie never disavowed it nor took any pains to show that it was not his own. 
 The fact that he Avas not its author is therefore only mentioned here as a 
 matter more or less interesting, and not at all as any excuse for MitcheFs 
 general style of newspaper war-making. He was a fanatic, clever and 
 iearless; he would neither have asked quarter nor given it; and undoubtedly 
 if Ireland had had many men of his desperate resolve she would have 
 been plunged into a bloody, an obstinate, and a disastrous contest against 
 the strength of the British Government.
 
 248 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xviu. 
 
 lu the meantime that Government had to do something. The Lord 
 Lieutenant could not go on for ever allowing a newspaper to scream out 
 appeals to rebellion, and to publish every week minute descriptions of the 
 easiest and quickest way of killing off English soldiers. The existing 
 laws were not strong enough to deal with Mitchel and to suppress his 
 paper. It would have been of little account to proceed against him under 
 the ordinary laws which condemned seditious speaking or writing. Pro- 
 secutions were in fact set on foot against O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel 
 himself for ordinary offences of that kind ; but the accused men got bail 
 and went on meantime speaking and writing as before, and when the cases 
 came to be tried by a jury the Government failed to obtain a conviction. 
 The Government therefore brought in a bill for the better security of the 
 Crown and Government, making all written incitement to insurrection or 
 resistance to the law felony punishable with transportation. This measure 
 was passed rapidly through all its stages. It enabled the Government to 
 suppress newspapers like the United Irishman, and to keep in prison Avith- 
 out bail, while awaiting trial, anyone charged with an offence under the 
 new Act. Mitchel soon gave the authorities an opportunity of testing the 
 eliicacy of the Act in his person. He repeated his incitements to insur- 
 rection, was arrested and thrown into prison. The climax of the excite- 
 ment in Ireland was reached when MitchePs trial came on. There can be 
 little doubt that lie was filled with a strong hope that his followers Avould 
 attempt to rescue him. He wrote from his cell that he could hear around 
 the walls of his prison every night the tramp of hundreds of sympathisers, 
 ' felons in heart and soul.' The Government for their part were in full 
 expectation that some sort of rising Avould take place. For the time, 
 Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and all the other Young Irelanders Avere thrown 
 into the shade, and the eyes of the Avhole country Avere turned upon 
 MitchePs cell. Had there been another Mitchel out of doors, as fearless 
 and reckless as the Mitchel in the prison, a sanguinary outbreak would 
 probably have taken place. But the leaders of the movement outside Avere 
 by no means clear in their own minds as to the course they ought to 
 pursue. Many of them Avere Avell satisfied of the hopelessness and folly of 
 auy rebellious movement, and nearly all were quite aAvare that in any case 
 ttie country just then Avas Avholly unprepared for anything of the kind. 
 Not a feAV had a shrewd suspicion that the movement never had taken any 
 real hold on the heart of the country. Some Avere jealous of MitchePs 
 sudden popularity, and in their secret hearts were disposed to curse him 
 for the trouble he had brought on them. But they could not attempt to 
 give open utterance to such a sentiment. Mitchel's boldness and resolve 
 had placed them at a sad disadvantage. He had that superiority of influ-
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 249 
 
 ence over them that downright determination always gives a man over 
 colleagues who do not quite know what they would have. One thing 
 however they could do ; and that they did. They discouraged any idea 
 o an attempt to rescue Mitchel. His trial came on. He was found guilty. 
 He made a short but powerful and impassioned speech from the dock ; he 
 was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation ; he was hurried under an 
 escort of cavalry through the streets of Dublin, put on board a ship of Avar, 
 and in a tew hours was on his way to Bermuda. Dublin remained per- 
 fectly quiet; the country outside hardly knew what was happening until 
 Mitchel was well on his way, and far-seeing persons smiled to themselves 
 and said the danger was all over. 
 
 So indeed it proved to be. The remainder of the proceedings partook 
 rather of the nature of burlesque. The Young Ireland leaders became 
 more demonstrative than ever. The Nation newspaper now went in 
 openly for rebellion, but rebellion at some unnamed time, and when 
 Ireland should be ready to meet the Saxon. It seemed to be assumed 
 that the Saxon, with a characteristic love of fair play, would let his foea 
 make all the preparations they pleased without any interference, and that 
 when they announced themselves ready, then, but not until then, would 
 he come forth to fight with them. Smith O'Brien went about the country 
 holding reviews of the ' Confederates,' as the Young Irelanders called 
 themselves. The Government, however, showed a contempt for the rules 
 of fair play, suspended the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, and issued war- 
 rants for the arrest of Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and other Confederate 
 leaders. The Young Irelanders received the news of this unchivalrie 
 proceeding with an outburst of anger and surprise which was evidently 
 genuine. They had clearly made up their minds that they were to go on 
 playing at preparation for rebellion as long as they liked to keep up the 
 game. They were completely puzzled by the new condition of things. It 
 was not very clear what Leonidas or Vergniaud would have done under 
 such circumstances ; it was certain that if they were all arrested the country 
 would not stir hand or foot in their behalf. Some of the principal leaders, 
 therefore Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Dillon, and others left Dublin and 
 went doAvn into the country. It is not certain even yet whether they had 
 any clear purpose of rebellion at first. It seems probable that they thought 
 of evading arrest for awhile, and trying meantime if the country was ready 
 to follow them into an armed movement. They held a series of gatherings, 
 which might be described as meetings of agitators or marshallings of rebels, 
 according as one was pleased to interpret their purpose. But this sort of 
 thing very soon drifted into rebellion. The principal body of the followers 
 of Smith O'Brien came into collision with the police, at a place called
 
 250 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvm. 
 
 Ballingarry in Tipperary. They attacked a small ibrce of police, who 
 took refuge in the cottage of a poor widow named Corrnack. The police 
 held the house as a besieged fort, and the rebels attacked them from the 
 famous cabbage-garden outside. The police fired a lew volleys. The 
 rebels fired, with what wretched muskets and rifles they possessed, but 
 without harming a single policeman. After a few of them had been killed 
 or wounded it never was perfectly certain that any were actually killed 
 the rebel army dispersed, and the rebellion was all over. In a few days 
 after poor Smith O'Brien was taken quietly at the railway station in 
 Thurles, Tipperary. lie was calmly buying a ticket for Limerick when 
 he was recognised. He made no resistance whatever, and seemed to regard 
 the whole mummery as at an end. He accepted his fate with the compo- 
 sure of a gentleman, and indeed in all the part which was left for him tc 
 play he bore himself with dignity. It is but justice to an unfortunate 
 gentleman to say that some reports which were rather ignobly set abroad 
 about his having showed a lack of personal courage in the Ballingarry 
 affray were, as all will readily believe, quite untrue. Some of the police 
 deposed that during the fight, if fight it could be called, poor O'Brien 
 exposed his life with entire recklessness. One policeman said lie could 
 have shot him easily at several periods of the little drama, but he felt 
 reluctant to be the slayer of the misguided descendant of the Irish kings. 
 It afterwards appeared also that any little chance of carrying on any manner 
 of rebellion was put a stop to by Smith O'Brien's own resolution that hia 
 rebels must not seize the private property of anyone. He insisted that 
 his rebellion must pay its way, and the funds were soon out. The Con- 
 federate leader woke from a dream when he saw his followers dispersing 
 after the first volley or two from the police. From that moment he behaved 
 like a dignified gentleman, equal to the fate he had brought upon him. 
 
 Meagher and two of his companions were arrested a few days after as 
 they were wandering hopelessly and aimlessly through the mountains of 
 Tipperary. The prisoners were brought for trial before a special (torn- 
 mission held at Clonmel in Tipperary, in the following September. Smith 
 O'Brien was the first put on trial, and he was found guilty. lie said a 
 few words with grave and dignified composure, simply declaring that he 
 had endeavoured to do his duty to his native country and that he was 
 prepared to abide the consequences. He was sentenced to death after the 
 old form in cases of high treason to be hanged, beheaded, and quartered. 
 Meagher was afterwards found guilty. Great commiseration was felt for 
 him. His youth and his eloquence made all men and women pity him. 
 His father was a wealthy man who had had a respected career in Parlia- 
 ment ; and there had seemed at one time to be a bright and happy l' 4 e
 
 184e. A JllSTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 2.51 
 
 before young Meagher. The short address in Avhich Meagher vindicated 
 his actions when called upon to show cause why sentence of death should 
 not be passed upon him, was full of manly and pathetic eloquence. He 
 had nothing, he wild, to retract or to ask pardon for. ' I am not here to 
 crave with faltering lip the life 1 have const-crated to the independence oi 
 my country. ... I oiler to my country as some proof of the sincerity 
 ,vith which I have thought and spoken and struggled for her, the life of a 
 young heart. . . . The history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies 
 it. ... Even here where the shadows of death surround me, and from 
 which I see my early grave opening for me in no consecrated soil, the hope 
 which beckoned me forth on that perilous sea whereon 1 have been wrecked 
 animates, consoles, enraptures me. No ; I do not despair of my poor old 
 country, her peace, her liberty, her glory.' 
 
 Meagher was sentenced to death with the same hideous formalities aa 
 those whicli had been observed in the case of Smith O'Brien. No one, 
 however, really believed for a moment that such a sentence was likely to 
 be carried out in the reign of Queen Victoria. The sentence of death was 
 changed into one of transportation for life. Nor was even this carried out. 
 The convicts were all sent to Australia, and a few years after Meagher con- 
 trived to make his escape. He was soon followed by Mitchel. The manner 
 of escape was at least of doubtful credit to the prisoners, for they were 
 placed under parole, and a very nice question was raised as to whether they 
 had not broken their parole by the attempt to escape. It was a nice ques- 
 tion, which in the case of men of a delicate sense of honour ought, one 
 would think, hardly to have arisen at all. The point in Mitchel's case was, 
 that he actually went to the police court within whose jurisdiction he was, 
 formally and publicly announced to tho magistrate that he withdrew his 
 parole, and invited the magistrate to arrest him then and there. But the 
 magistrate was unprepared for his coming and was quite thrown off his 
 guard. Mitchel was armed, and so was a friend who accompanied him, 
 and who had planned and carried out the escape. They had horses waiting 
 at the door, and when they saw that the magistrate did riot know what to 
 do, they left the court, mounted the horses, and rode away. It was con- 
 tended by Mitchel and by his companion Mr. P. J. Smyth (afterwards a 
 distinguished member of Parliament), that they had fulfilled all the con- 
 ditions required by the parole and had formally and honourably with- 
 drawn it. One is only surprised how men of honour could thus puzzle 
 and deceive themselves. The understood condition of a parole is that a 
 man who intends to withdraw it shall place himself before his captors in 
 exactly the same condition as he was when on his pledged word of honour 
 they allowed him a comparative liberty. It is eviden* that a prisoner
 
 202 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xvm. 
 
 would never be allowed to go at large on parole if he were to make use 
 of his liberty to arrange all the conditions of an escape, and when every- 
 thing wae ready, take his captors by surprise, tell them he was no longer 
 bound by the conditions of the pledge, and that they might keep him if 
 they could. It was long believed in England that Smith O'Brien had 
 declined to have anything to do with Mitchel's escape. But it is only 
 just to Mitchcl and his advisers to say that the whole plan was submitted 
 to O'Brien, and that it had his entire approval, and it is clear that 
 O'Brien too could not have thought there was anything dishonourable 
 in it. Smith O'Brien himself afterwards received a pardon on condition of 
 his not returning to these islands ; but this condition was withdrawn after 
 a time, and he came back to Ireland. He died quietly in Wales in 1864 
 Mitchel settled for a while in Richmond, Virginia, and became an ardenA 
 advocate of slavery and an impassioned champion of the Southern rebellion, 
 He returned to the North al'ter the rebellion, and more lately came to 
 Ireland, where, owing to some defect in the criminal law, he could not be 
 arrested, his time of penal servitude having expired although he had not 
 served it. He was still a hero with a certain class of the people ; he was 
 put up as a candidate for an Irish county, and elected. He was not allowed 
 to enter the House of Commons, however ; the election was declared void, 
 and a new writ was issued. He was elected again, and some turmoil was 
 expected, when suddenly Mitchel, who had long been in sinking health, 
 was withdrawn from the controversy by death. lie should have died 
 before. The later years of his life were only an anti-climax. His attitude 
 in the dock in 1848 had something of dignity and heroism in it, and even 
 the staunchest enemies of his cause admired him. He had undoubtedly 
 great literary ability, and if he had never reappeared in politics the world 
 would have thought that a really brilliant light had been prematurely 
 extinguished. Meagher served in the army of the Federal States when the 
 war broke out, and showed much of the soldier's spirit and capacity. His 
 end was premature and inglorious. He fell from the deck of a steamer one 
 night ; it was dark and there was a strong current running ; help came too 
 late. A false step, a dark night, and the muddy waters of the Missouri 
 closed the career that had opened with so much promise of brightness. 
 
 Many of the conspicuous Young Irelandcrs rose to some distinction. 
 Charles Gavan Duffy, the editor of the Nation, who was twice put on 
 his trial after the failure of the insurrection, but whom the jury would 
 not on either occasion convict, became a member of the House of 
 Commons, and afterwards emigrated to the colony of Victoria, lie rose 
 to be prime Minister there, and received knighthood from the Crown 
 and a pension from the Colonial Parliament. Thonas Darcy M'Gee, 
 Another prominent rebel, went to th<; United States, and thence to Canada,
 
 1848. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 253 
 
 where ho rose to he a minister of the Crown. lie was one of the most 
 loyal supporters of the British connection. His untimely death by 
 the hand of an assassin was lamented in England as well as in the colony 
 he had served so well. Some of the Young Irelanders remained in the 
 United States and won repute ; others returned to England, and of these 
 not a few entered the House of Commons and were respected there, the 
 lollies of their youth quite forgotten by their colleagues, even if not dis- 
 owned by themselves. A remarkable illustration of the spirit of fairness 
 that generally pervades the House of Commons is found in the fact that 
 everyone there respected John Martin, who to the day of his death avowed 
 himself, in Parliament and out of it, a consistent and unrepentant opponent 
 of British rule in Ireland. He was respected because of the purity of his 
 character and the transparent sincerity of his purpose. Martin had been 
 devoted to Mitchel in his lifetime, and he died a few days after Mitchel's 
 death. 
 
 The Young Ireland movement came and vanished like a shadow. It 
 never had any reality or substance in it. It was a literary and poetic 
 inspiration altogether. It never took the slightest hold of the peasantry. 
 It hardly touched any men of mature years. It was a rather pretty playing 
 at rebellion. It was an imitation of the French Revohition as the Giron- 
 dists imitated the patriots of Greece and Rome. But it might, perhaps, 
 have had a chance of doing memorable mischief if the policy of the one 
 only man in the business who really was in earnest and was reckless had 
 been carried out. It is another illustration of the fact which O'Connell's 
 movement had exemplified before, that in Irish politics a climax cannot 
 he repeated or recalled. There is something fitful in all Irish agitation. 
 The national emotion can be wrought up to a certain temperature; and if 
 at that boiling point nothing is done, the heat suddenly goes out, and 
 no blowing of Cyclopean bellows can rekindle it. The Repeal agitation 
 was brought up to this point when the meeting at Clontarf was convened ; 
 the dispersal of the meeting was the end of the whole agitation. With the 
 Young Ireland movement the trial of Mitchel formed the climax. After 
 that a wise legislator would have known that there was nothing more to 
 fear. Petion, the revolutionary Mayor of Paris, knew that when it rained 
 his partisans could do nothing. There were in 1848 observant Irishmen 
 who knew that after the Mitchel climax had been reached the crowd would 
 disperse, not to be collected again for that time. 
 
 These two agitations, the Chartist and the Young Ireland, constituted 
 what may be called our tribute to the power of the insurrectionary spirit 
 that was abroad over Europe in 1848. In almost every other European 
 State revolution raised its head fiercely, and fought out its claims in the 
 very capital, under the eyes of bewildered royalty. The whole of Italy,
 
 254 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xvm. 
 
 irom the Alps to the Straits of Messina, and from Venice to Genoa, was 
 thrown into convulsion ; ' Our Italy ' once again ' shone o'er with civil 
 swords.' There was insurrection in Berlin and in Vienna. The Emperor 
 had to fly from the latter city as the Pope had fled from Rome. In Paris 
 there came a Red Republican rising against a Republic that strove not to 
 be red, and the rising was crushed by Cavaignac with a terrible strenuous- 
 ness that made some of the streets of Paris literally to run with blood. It 
 was a grim foreshadowing of the Commune of 1871. Another remarkable 
 foreshadowing of what was to come was seen in the fact that the Prince 
 Louis Napoleon, long an exile from France, had been allowed to return to 
 it, and at the close of the year, in the passion for law and order at any 
 price born of the lied Republican excesses, had been elected President of 
 the French Republic. Hungary was in arms ; Spain was in convulsion ; 
 even Switzerland was not safe. Our contribution to this general commotion 
 was to be found in the demonstration on Kennington Common and the 
 abortive attempt at a rising near Ballingarry. There could not possibly 
 be a truer tribute to the solid strength of our system. Not for one moment 
 was the political constitution of England seriously endangered. Not for 
 one hour did the safety of our great communities require a call upon the 
 soldiers instead of upon the police. Not one charge of cavalry was needed 
 to put down the fiercest outburst of the rebellious spirit in England. Not 
 one single execution took place. The meaning of this is clear. It is not that 
 there were no grievances in our system calling for redress. It is not that the 
 existing institutions' did not bear heavily down on many classes. It is not that 
 our political or social system was so conspicuously better than that of some 
 European countries which were torn and ploughed up by revolution. To 
 imagine that we owed our freedom from revolution to our freedom from serious 
 grievance would be to misread altogether the lessons offered to our statesmen 
 by that eventful year. We have done the work of whole generations of Re- 
 formers in the interval between this time and that. We have made peaceful 
 reforms, political, industrial, legal, since then which, if not to be had other- 
 wise, would have justified any appeal to revolution. There, however, we 
 touch upon the lesson of the time. Our political and constitutional system 
 rendered an appeal to force unnecessary and superfluous. No call to arms 
 was needed to bring about any reform that the common judgment of the 
 country might demand. Other peoples flew to arms because they were 
 driven by despair ; because there was no way in their political constitution 
 for the influence of public opinion to make itself justly felt; because those 
 who were in power held it by the force of bayonets and not of public 
 agreement. The results of the year were on the whole unfavourable to 
 popular liberty. The results of the year that followed were decidedly re-
 
 1848. A HISTORY 01- OUJt OWN TIM EH. 25!> 
 
 nctionary. Tin- time li:ul not come in 1948 or 1849 for Liberal principles 
 to assert themselves. Their ' great deed,' to quote some of the words of 
 our English poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ' was too great.' We in 
 this country were saved alike from the revolution and the reaction by the 
 universal recognition of the fact among all who gave themselves time to 
 think, that public opinion, being the ultimate ruling power, was the only 
 authority to which an appeal was needed, and that in the end justice would 
 be done. All but the very wildest spirits could afford to wait; and no 
 revolutionary movement is really dangerous which is only the work of 
 the wildest spirits. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 DON TACIFICO 
 
 THE name of Don Pacilico was as familiar to the world some quarter of 
 a century ago as that of M. Jecker was about the time of the French 
 invasion of Mexico. Don Pacifico became famous for a season as the man 
 whose quarrel had nearly brought on a European Avar, caused a temporary 
 disturbance of good relations between England and France, split up 
 political parties in England in a manner hardly ever known before, and 
 established the reputation of Lord Palmerston as one of the greatest Par- 
 liamentary debaters of his time. Among the memorable speeches delivered 
 in the English House of Commons that of Lord Palmerston on the Don 
 Pacifico debate must always take a place. It was not because the subject 
 of the debate was a great one, or because there were any grand principles 
 involved. The question originally in dispute was unutterably trivial and 
 paltry ; there was no particular principle involved ; it was altogether what 
 is called in commercial litigation a qiiestion of account ; a controversy 
 about the amount and time of payment of a doubtful claim. Nor was 
 the. speech delivered by Lord Palmerston one of the grand historical dis- 
 plays of oratory that even when the sound of them is lost send their echoes 
 to ' roll from soul to soul.' It was not like one of Burke's great speeches, 
 or one of Chatham's. It was not one calculated to provoke keen literary 
 controversy, like Sheridan's celebrated ' Begum speech,' which all con- 
 temporaries held to be unrivalled, but which a later generation assumes 
 to have been rather flashy rhetoric. There are no passages of splendid 
 eloquence in Palmerston's Pacifico speech. Its great merit was its wonder- 
 ful power as a contribution to Parliamentary argument ; as a masterly 
 appeal to the feelings, the prejudices, and the passions of the House of
 
 256 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xre. 
 
 Commons ; as a complete Parliamentary victory over a combination of the 
 most influential, eloquent, and heterogeneous opponents. 
 
 Don Pacifico was a Jew, a Portugeuese by extraction, but a native of 
 Gibraltar and a British subject. His house in Athens was attacked and 
 plundered in the open day on April 4, 1847, by an Athenian mob, who 
 were headed, it was affirmed, by two sons of the Greek Minister of War. 
 The attack came about in this way. It had been customary in Greek 
 towns to celebrate Easter by burning an effigy of Judas Iscariot. In 1847 
 the police of Athens were ordered to prevent this performance, and the 
 'nob, disappointed of their favourite amusement, ascribed the new orders 
 to the influence of the Jews. Don Pacifico' s house happened to stand near 
 the spot where the Judas was annually burnt ; Don Pacifico was known 
 to be a Jew ; and the anger of the mob was wreaked upon him accordingly. 
 There could be no doubt that the attack was lawless, and that the Greek 
 authorities took no trouble to protect Pacifico against it. Don Pacifico 
 made a claim against the Greek Government for compensation. He 
 estimated his losses, direct and indirect, at nearly thirty-two thousand 
 pounds sterling. Another claim was made at the same time by another 
 British subject, a man of a very different stump from Don Pacifico. This 
 was Mr. Finlay, the historian of Greece. Mr. Finlay had gone out to 
 Greece in the enthusiastic days of Byron and Cochrane and Church and 
 Hastings; and he settled in Athens when the independence of Greece had 
 been established. Some of his land had been taken for the purpose of 
 rounding off the new palace gardens of King Otho ; and Mr. Finlay had 
 declined to accept the terms offered by the Greek Government, to which 
 other landowners in the same position as himself had assented. Some 
 stress was laid by Lord Palmerston's antagonists in the course of the 
 debate on the fact that Mr. Finlay thus stood out apart from other land- 
 owners in Athens. Mr. Finlay, however, had a perfect right to stand out 
 for any price he thought fit. Pie was in the same position as a Greek 
 resident of London or Manchester whose land is taken for the purposes of 
 a railway or other public improvement, and who declines to accept the 
 amount of compensation tendered for it in the first instance. The pecu- 
 liarity of the case was that Mr. Finlay was not left, as the supposed Greek 
 gentleman assuredly would be, to make good his claims for himself in the 
 courts of law. Neither Don Pacifico nor Mr. Finlay had appealed to the 
 law courts at all. But about this time our Foreign Office had had several 
 little complaints against the Greek authorities. We had taken so consider- 
 able a part in setting up Greece that our ministers not unnaturally thought 
 Greece ought to show her gratitude by attending a little more closely to 
 our advice. On the other hand, Lord Palrnerston had made up his mind
 
 1850. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 257 
 
 that there was constant intrigue going on against our interests among the 
 foreign diplomatists in Athens. He was convinced that France was per- 
 petually plotting against us there, and that Russia was watching an oppor- 
 tunity to supersede, once for all, our influence by completely establishing 
 hers. Don Pacifico's sheets, counterpanes, and gold watch had the 
 advantage of being made the subject of a trial of strength between 
 England on the one side, and France and Russia on the other. 
 
 There had been other complaints as well. Ionian subjects of her 
 Majesty had sent in remonstrances against lawless or high-handed pro- 
 ceedings ; and a midshipman of her Majesty's ship Fantdme, landing from 
 a boat at night on the shore of Patras, had been arrested by mistake. 
 None of these questions would seem at first sight to wear a very grave 
 international character. All they needed for settlement, it might be 
 thought, was a little open discussion and the exercise of some good sense 
 and moderation on both sides. It cannot be doubted that the Greek 
 authorities were lax and careless, and that acts had been done which they 
 could not justify. It is only fair to say that they do not appear to have 
 tried to justify some of them ; but they were of opinion that certain of the 
 claims were absurdly exaggerated, and in this belief they proved to be 
 well sustained. The Greeks were very poor, and also very dilatory ; and 
 they gave Lord Palmerston a reasonable excuse for a little impatience. 
 Unluckily, Lord Palmerston became possessed with the idea that the 
 French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek Government on 
 to resist our claims. For the Foreign Office had made the claims ours. 
 They had lumped up the outrages on Ionian seamen, the mistaken arrest 
 of the midshipman (who had been released with apologies the moment hi? 
 nationality and position were discovered), Mr. Finlay's land, and Don 
 Pacifico's household furniture in one claim, converted it into a national 
 demand, and insisted that Greece must pay up within a given time or take 
 the consequences. Greece hesitated, and accordingly the British fleet was 
 ordered to the Pirseus. It made its appearance very promptly there, and 
 seized all the Greek vessels belonging to the Government and to private 
 merchants that were found within the waters. 
 
 The Greek Government appealed to France and Russia as Powers 
 joined with us in the treaty to protect the independence of Greece 
 France and Russia were both disposed to make bitter complaint of not 
 having been consulted in the first instance by the British Government ; nor 
 was their feeling greatly softened by Lord Palmerston's peremptory reply 
 that it was all a question between England and Greece, with which no 
 other Power had any business to interfere. The Russian Government 
 wrote an angry, and indeed an offensive remonstrance. The Russian 
 
 VOL. I. S
 
 258 A HISTORY OF OWE OWN TIMES. OH. xix. 
 
 Foreign Minister spoke of ' the very painful impression produced upon 
 the mind of the Emperor by the unexpected acts of violence which the 
 British authorities had just directed against Greece;' and asked if Great 
 Britain, ' abusing the advantages which are afforded to her by her immense 
 maritime superiority,' intended to 'disengage herself from all obligation,' and 
 to ' authorise all great Powers on every fitting opportunity to recognise 
 towards the weak no other rule but their own will, no other right but 
 their own physical strength.' The French Government, perhaps under 
 the pressure of difficulties and uncertain affairs at home, in their unsettled 
 state showed a better temper, and intervened only in the interests of peace 
 and good understanding. Something like a friendly arbitration was 
 accepted from France, and the French Government sent a special repre- 
 sentative to Athens to try to come to terms with our minister there. The 
 difficulties appeared likely to be adjusted. All the claims except those of 
 Don Pacifico were matter of easy settlement, and at first the French com- 
 missioner seemed even willing to accept Don Pacifico's stupendous valua- 
 tion of his household goods. But Pacifico had introduced other demands 
 of a more shadowy character. He said that he had certain claims on the 
 Portuguese Government, and that the papers on which these claims rested 
 for support were destroyed in the sacking of his house, and therefore he 
 felt entitled to ask for 26,618/. as compensation on that account also. The 
 French commissioner was a little staggered at this demand, and declined 
 to accede to it without further consideration ; and as our minister, Mr. 
 Wyse, did not believe he had any authority to abate any of the now 
 national demand, the negotiation was for the time broken off. In the 
 meantime, however, negotiations had still been going on between the 
 English and French Governments in London, and these had resulted in a 
 convention disposing of all the disputed claims. By the terms of thi>: 
 agreement a sum of eight thousand five hundred pounds was to be paid by 
 the Greek Government to be divided among the various claimants; and 
 Greece was also to pay whatever sum might be found to be fairly due on 
 account of Don Pacifico's Portuguese claims after these had been investi- 
 gated by arbitrators. This would seem a very satisfactory and honourable 
 arrangement. But some demon of mischief appeared to have this unlucky 
 affair in charge from the first. The two negotiations going on in London 
 <md Athens simultaneously got in each other's way. Instructions as to 
 what had been agreed to in London were not forwarded to Athens quickly 
 enough by the English Government, and when the French Government 
 sent out to their commissioner the news of the convention he found that 
 Mr. Wyse knew nothing about the matter, and had no authority which, 
 AS he conceived, would have warranted him in departing from the course
 
 I SAO. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 259 
 
 of uctioii he was following out. Mr. Wyse, therefore, proceeded with hi 
 measures of coercion, and at length the Greek Government gave way. The 
 convention having, however, been made in the meantime in London, there 
 then arose a question as to whether that convention or the terms extorted 
 at Athens should be the basis of arrangement. Over this trumpery dis- 
 pute, which a lew words of frank good sense and good temper on both 
 sides would have easily settled, a new quarrel seemed at one time likely 
 to break out between England and France. The French Government 
 actually withdrew their ambassador, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, from London ; 
 and there was for a short time a general alarm over Europe. But the 
 question in dispute was really too small and insignificant for any two 
 rational governments to make it a cause of serious quarrel ; and after a 
 while our Government gave way, and agreed to an arrangement which 
 was in the main all that France desired. When, after a long lapse of 
 time, the arbitrators came to settle the claims of Don Pacifico, it was found 
 that he was entitled to about one-thirtieth of the sum he had originally 
 demanded. He had assessed all his claims on the same liberal and fanci- 
 ful scale as that which he adopted in estimating the value of his household 
 property. Don Pacifico, it seems, charged in his bill one hundred and 
 fifty pounds sterling for a bedstead, thirty pounds for the sheets of the 
 bed, twenty-five pounds for two coverlets, and ten pounds for a pillow- 
 case. Cleopatra might have been contented with bed-furniture so 
 luxurious as Don Pacifico represented himself to have in his common use. 
 The jewellery of his Avife and daughters he estimated at two thousand 
 pounds. He gave no vouchers for any of these claims, saying that all his 
 papers had been destroyed by the mob. It seemed too that he had always 
 lived in a humble sort of way, and was never supposed by his neighbours 
 to possess such splendour of ornament and household goods. 
 
 While the controversy between the English and French Governments 
 was yet unfinished, a Parliamentary controversy between the former 
 Government and the Opposition in the House of Lords was to begin. 
 Lord Stanley proposed a resolution which was practically a vote of censure 
 on the Government. The resolution in fact expressed the regret of the 
 House to find that ' various claims against the Greek Government, doubt- 
 ful in point of justice, or exaggerated in amount, have been enforced by 
 coercive measures, directed against the commerce and people of Greece, 
 and calculated to endanger the continuance of our friendly relations with 
 foreign Powers.' The resolution was carried, after a debate of great 
 spirit and energy, by a majority of thirty-seven. Lord Palmerston was 
 not dismayed. A Ministry is seldom greatly troubled by an adverse vote 
 in the House of Lords. The Foreign Secretary, writing about the result 
 
 8 2
 
 260 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xix. 
 
 of the division the following day, merely said : ' We were beaten last 
 night in the Lords by a larger majority than we had, up to the last 
 moment, expected ; but when we took office we knew that our opponents 
 had a larger pack in the Lords than we had, and that whenever the two 
 packs were to be fully dealt out, theirs would show a larger number than 
 ours.' Still it was necessary that something should be done in the Com- 
 mons to counterbalance the stroke of the Lords, and accordingly Mr. 
 Roebuck, acting as an independent member, although on this occasion in 
 harmony with the Government, gave notice of a resolution which boldly 
 affirmed that the principles on which the foreign policy of the Government 
 had been regulated were ' such as were calculated to maintain the honour 
 and dignity of this country ; and in times of unexampled difficulty to 
 preserve peace between England and the various nations of the world.' 
 On June 24, 1850, a night memorable in Parliamentary annals as the 
 opening night of the debate which established Lord Palmerston's position 
 as a great leader of party, Mr. Roebuck brought forward his resolution. 
 
 A reader xinaccustomed to Parliamentary tactics may fail to observe 
 the peculiar shrewdness of the resolution. It was framed, at least it reads 
 as if it had been framed, to accomplish one purpose, while professing to 
 serve another. It was intended, of course, as a reply to the censure of the 
 House of Lords. It was to proclaim to the world that the Representative 
 Chamber had reversed the decision of the House of Peers and acquitted 
 the Ministry. But what did Mr. Roebuck's resolution actually do ? Did 
 it affirm that the Government had acted rightly with regard to Greece ? 
 The dealings with Greece were expressly censured by the House of Lords ; 
 but Mr. Roebuck proposed to affirm that the general policy of the Ministry 
 deserved the approval of the House of Commons. It was well known that 
 there were many men of Liberal opinions in the House of Commons who 
 did not approve of the course pursued with regard to Greece, but who 
 would yet have been very sorrv to give a vote which might contribute to 
 the overthrow of a Liberal Government. The resolution was so framed 
 as to offer to all such an opportunity of supporting the Govern- 
 ment, and yet satisfying their consciences. For it might be thus put to 
 them ' You think the Government were too harsh witli Greece ? Perhaps 
 you are right. But this resolution does not say that they were quite free 
 of blame in their way of dealing with Greece. It only says that their 
 policy on the whole has been sound and successful ; and of course you 
 must admit that. They may have made a little mistake with regard to 
 Greece ; but admitting that, do you not still think that on the whole they 
 have done very well, and much better than any Tory Ministry would be 
 likely to do ? That is all that Roebuck's resolution asks you to affirm 
 and you really cannot vote against it.'
 
 1850. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 201 
 
 A large number of Liberals wens no doubt influenced by this view ol 
 the situation and by the framing of the resolution. But there were some 
 who could not be led into any approval of the particular transaction which 
 the resolution, if riot intended to cover, would certainly he made to cover. 
 There were others, too, who, even on the broader field opened purposely up 
 by the resolution, honestly believed that Lord Palmerston's general policy 
 was an incessant violation of the principle of non-intervention, and was 
 therefore injurious to the character and the safety of the country. In a pro- 
 longed and powerful debate some of the foremost men on both sides of the 
 House opposed and denounced the policy of the Government, for which, 
 as everyone knew, Lord Palmerston was almost exclusively responsible. 
 ' The allied troops who led the attack,' says Mr. Evelyn Ashley, in his 
 Life of Lord Palmerston, ' were English Protectionists and foreign Abso- 
 lutists.' It is strange that an able and usually fair-minded man should be 
 led into such an absurdity. Lord Palmerston himself called it ' a shot 
 fired by a foreign conspiracy aided and abetted by a domestic intrigue.' 
 But Lord Palmerston was the minister personally assailed, and might be 
 excused, perhaps, for believing at the moment that warring monarchs 
 were giving the fatal wound, and that the attack on him was the work oi 
 the combined treachery of Europe. An historian looking back upon the 
 events after an interval of a quarter of a century ought to be able to take 
 a calmer view of things. Among the ' English Protectionists ' who took 
 a prominent part in condemning the policy of Lord Palmerston, were Mr. 
 Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, Sir Robert Peel, Sir William Molesworth, and 
 Mr. Sidney Herbert. In the House of Lords, Lord Brougham, Lord 
 Canning and Lord Aberdeen had supported the resolution of Lord Stanley. 
 The truth is, that Lord Palmerston's proceedings were fairly open to 
 difference of judgment even on the part of the most devoted Liberals and 
 the most independent thinkers. It did not need that a man should be a 
 Protectionist or an Absolutist to explain his entire disapproval of such a 
 course of conduct as that which had been followed out with regard to 
 Greece. It seems to us now, quietly looking back at the whole story, 
 hardly possible that a man with, for example, the temperament and the 
 general views of Mr. Gladstone could have approved of such a policy ; 
 obviously impossible that a man like Mr. Cobden could have approved of 
 it. These men simply followed their judgment and their conscience. 
 
 The principal interest of the debate now rests in the manner of Lord 
 Palmerston's defence. The speech was indeed a masterpiece of Parlia- 
 mentary argument and address. It was in part a complete exposition and 
 defence of the whole course of the foreign policy which the noble speaker 
 had directed. But although the resolution treated only of the general
 
 262 A HISTORY OF OUJR OWN TIMES. CB. six. 
 
 policy of the Government, Lord Palmerston did not fail to make a special 
 defence of his action towards Greece. He based his vindication of this 
 particular chapter of his policy on the ground which, of all others, gave 
 him most advantage in addressing a Parliamentary assembly. He con- 
 tended that in all he had done he had been actuated by the resolve that 
 the poorest claimant who bore the name of an English citizen should be 
 protected by the whole strength of England against the oppression of a 
 foreign government. His speech was an appeal to all the elementary 
 emotions of manhood and citizenship and good-fellowship. To vote 
 against him seemed to be to declare that England was tinable or unwilling 
 to protect her children. A man appeared to be guilty of an unpatriotic 
 and ignoble act who censured the minister whose only error, if error it were, 
 was a too proud and generous resolve to make the name of England and the 
 rights of Englishmen respected throughout the world. A good deal of ridi- 
 cule had been heaped not unnaturally on Don Pacifico, his claims, his career, 
 and his costly bed furniture. Lord Palmerston turned that very ridicule 
 to good account for his own cause. He repelled with a warmth of seem- 
 ingly generous indignation the suggestion that because a man was lowly, 
 pitiful, even ridiculous, even of doubtful conduct in his earlier career, 
 therefore he was one with whom a foreign government was not bound to 
 observe any principles of fair dealing at all. He protested against having 
 serious things treated jocosely ; as if any man in Parliament had ever 
 treated serious things more often in a jocose spirit. He protested against 
 having the House kept ' in a roar of laughter at the poverty of one sufferer 
 or at the miserable habitation of another ; at the nationality of one man, or 
 the religion of another; as if because a man was poor he might be basti- 
 nadoed and tortured with impunity, as if a man who was born in Scotland 
 might bo robbed without redress, or because a man is of the Jewish per- 
 suasion he is a fair mark for any outrage.' Lord Palmerston had also a 
 great advantage given to him by the argument of some of his opponents, 
 that whatever the laws of a foreign country, a stranger has only to abide 
 by them, and that a government claiming redress for any wrong done to 
 one of its subjects is completely answered by the statement that he has 
 suffered only as inhabitants of the country themselves have suffered. The 
 argument against Lord Palmerston was pushed entirely too far in this 
 instance, and it gave him one of his finest opportunities for reply. It is 
 true as a general rule in the intercourse of nations, that a stranger who 
 goes voluntarily into a country is expected to abide by its laws, and that 
 his government will not protect him from their ordinary operation in every 
 case where it may seem to press hardly or even mi fairly against him. But 
 in this understanding is always involved a distinct assumption that the
 
 I860. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 263 
 
 laws ot the State are to be such as civilisation would properly recognise ; 
 supposing that the State in question professes to be a civilised State. It 
 ia also distinctly assumed that the State must be able and willing to enforce 
 its own laws where they are fairly invoked on behalf of a foreigner. Ilj 
 for instance, a foreigner has a just claim against some continental govern- 
 ment, and that government will not recognise the claim, or recognising it 
 will not satisfy it; and the government of the injured man intervenes and 
 asks that his claim shall be met, it would never be accounted a sufficient 
 answer to say that many of the inhabitants of the country had been treated 
 just in the same way and had got no redress. If there were a law in Turkey, 
 or any other slave-owning State, that a man who could not pay his debts 
 was liable to have his wife and daughter sold into slavery, it is certain 
 that no government like that of England would hear of the application of 
 such a law to the family of a poor English trader settled in Constantinople. 
 There is no clear rule easy to be laid down ; perhaps there can be- no 
 clear rule on the subject at all. But it is evident that the governments of 
 all civilised countries do exercise a certain protectorate over their subjects 
 in foreign countries, and do insist in extreme cases that the laws of the 
 country shall not be applied or denied to them in a manner which a native 
 resident might think himself compelled to endure without protest. It is 
 not even so in the case of manifestly harsh and barbarous laws alone, or of 
 the denial of justice in a harsh and barbarous way. The principle pre- 
 vails even in regard to laws which are in themselves unexceptionable ana 
 necessary. No government, for example, will allow one of its subjects 
 living in a foreign country to be brought under the law for the levying 
 of the conscription there and compelled to serve in the army of a foreign 
 State. 
 
 All this only shows that the opponents of Lord Palmerston made a 
 mistake when they endeavoured to obtain any general assent to the prin- 
 ciple that a minister does wrong who asks for his fellow- subjects at the 
 hands of a foreign government any better treatment than that which the 
 government in question administers, and without revolt, to its own people. 
 Lord Palmerston was not the man to lose so splendid an opportunity. He 
 really made it appear as if the question between him and his opponents 
 was that of the protection of Englishmen abroad ; as if he were anxious to 
 look after their lives and safety, while his -opponents were urging the 
 odious principle that when once an Englishman put his foot on a foreign 
 shore his own government renounced all intent to concern themselves with 
 any fate that might befall him. Here was a new turn given to the debate, 
 a new opportunity afforded to those who, while they did not approve ex- 
 actly of what had been done with Greece, were nevertheless anxious to
 
 264 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xix. 
 
 Bupport the general principles of Lord Palmerston's foreign policy. The 
 speech was a marvellous appeal to what are called ' English interests.' In 
 a peroration of thrilling power Lord Palmerston asked for the verdict of 
 the House to decide ' whether, as the Roman in days of old held himself 
 free from indignity when he could say " Civis Romanus sum," so also a 
 British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the 
 watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against in- 
 justice and wrong.' 
 
 When Lord Palmerston closed his speech the overwhelming plaudits 
 of the House foretold the victory he had won. It was indeed a master- 
 piece of telling defence. The speech occupied some five hours in delivery. 
 It was spoken, as Mr. Gladstone afterwards said, from the dusk of one 
 day to the dawn of the next. It was spoken without the help of a single 
 note. Lord Palmerston always wisely thought that in order to have full 
 command of such an audience a man should, if possible, never use notes. 
 He was quite conscious of his own lack of the higher gifts of imagination 
 and emotion that make the great orator ; but he knew also what a splendid 
 weapon of attack and defence was his fluency and readiness, and he was 
 not willing to weaken the effect of its spontaneity by the interposition of 
 a single note. All this great speech, therefore, full as it was of minute 
 details, names, dates, figures, references of all kinds, was delivered with 
 the same facility, the same lack of effort, the same absence of any adven- 
 titious aids to memory which characterised Palmerston's ordinary style 
 when he answered a simple question. Nothing could be more complete 
 than Palmerston's success. ' Civis Romanus ' settled the matter. Who 
 was in the House of Commons so rude that would not be a Roman ? Who 
 was there so lacking in patriotic spirit that would not have his countrymen 
 as good as any Roman citizen of them all ? It was to little purpose that 
 Mr. Gladstone, in a speech of singular argumentative power, pointed out 
 that ' a Roman citizen was the member of a privileged caste, of a victorious 
 and conquering nation, of a nation that held all others bound down by the 
 strong arm of power which had one law for him and another for the rest 
 of the world, which asserted in his favour principles which it denied to all 
 others.' It was in vain that Mr. Gladstone asked whether Lord Palmer- 
 ston thought that was the position which it would become a civilised and 
 Christian nation like England to claim for her citizens. The glory of 
 being a ' oivis Romanus ' was far too strong for any mere argument drawn 
 from fact and common sense to combat against it. The phrase had carried 
 the day. When Mr. Cockburn, in supporting Lord Palmerston's policy, 
 quoted from classical authority to show that the Romans had always 
 avenged any wrongs done to their citizens, and cited from one of Cicero's
 
 i860. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 266 
 
 speeches against Verres, ' Quot bella majores no.stros et quanta suscepisse 
 arbitramini, quod cives Roman! injuria afFecti, quod navicularii retenti, 
 quod mercatores spoliati dicerentur ? ' the House cheered more tumultously 
 than ever. In vain was the calm, grave, studiously moderate remonstrance 
 of Sir Robert Peel, who, while generously declaring that Palmerston's 
 speech ' made us all proud of tho man who delivered it,' yet recorded his 
 firm protest against the style of policy which Palmerston's eloquence had 
 endeavoured to glorify. The victory was all with Palrnerston. He had, 
 in the words of Shakespeare's Rosalind, wrestled well and overthrown more 
 than his enemies. 
 
 After a debate of four nights, a majority of forty-six was given for the 
 resolution. The Ministry came out not only absolved but triumphant. 
 The odd thing about the whole proceeding is that the ministers in general 
 heartily disapproved of the sort of policy which Palmerston put so ener- 
 getically into action at least they disapproved, if not his principles, yet 
 certainly his way of enforcing them. Before this debate came on Lord 
 John Russell had made up his mind that it would be impossible for him 
 to remain in office with Lord Palmerston as Foreign Secretary. None the 
 less, however, did Lord John Russell defend the policy of the Foreign 
 Office in a speech which Palmerston himself described as ' admirable and 
 first-rate.' The ministers felt bound to stand by the actions which they 
 had not repudiated at the time when they were done. They could not 
 allow Lord Palmerston to be separated from them in political responsibi- 
 lity when they had not separated themselves from moral responsibility for 
 his proceedings in time. Therefore they had to defend in Parliament 
 what they did not pretend to approve in private. The theory of a Cabinet 
 always united when attacked rendered doubtless such a course of proceed- 
 ing necessary in Parliamentary tactics. It would, perhaps, be hard to 
 make it seem quite satisfactory to the simple and unsophisticated mind. 
 No part of our duty calls on us to attempt such a task. It was a famous 
 victory we must only settle the question as old Caspar disposed of the 
 doubts about the propriety of the praise given to the Duke of Marlborough 
 and ' our good Prince Eugene.' ' It is not telling a lie,' says some one in 
 Thackeray, ' it is only voting with your party.' But Thackeray had 
 never been in the House of Commons. 
 
 Of many fine speeches made during this brilliant debate we must 
 notice one in particular. It was that of Mr. Cockburn, then member for 
 Southampton a speech to which allusion has already been made. Never 
 in our time has a reputation been more suddenly, completely, and deserv- 
 edly made than Mr. Cockburn won by his brilliant display of ingenious 
 argument and stirring words. The manner of the speaker lent additional
 
 E66 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. OH. xix 
 
 effect to his clover and captivating eloquence. lie had a clear, sweet, 
 penetrating voice, a fluency that seemed so easy as to make listeners some- 
 times fancy that it ought to cost no effort, and a grace of gesture such as it 
 must be owned the courts of law where he had had his training do not often 
 teach. Mr. Cockburn defended the policy of Palmerston with an effect 
 only inferior to that produced by Palmerston's own speech, and with a 
 rhetorical grace and finish to which Palmerston made no pretension. In 
 writing to Lord Normanby about the debate, Lord Palmerston distributed 
 his pi'aise to friends and enemies with that generous impartiality which 
 was a fine part of his character. Gladstone's attack on his policy he pro- 
 nounced ' a first-rate performance.' Peel and Disraeli he praised likewise. 
 But ' as to Cockburn's,' he said, ' I do not know that I ever in the course 
 of my life heard a better speech, from anybody, without any exception.' 
 The effect which Cockburn's speecli produced on the House was well de- 
 cribed in the House itself by one who rose chiefly for the purpose of dis- 
 puting the principles it advocated. Mr. Cobden observed that when Mr. 
 Cockburn had concluded his speech, ' one-half of the Treasury benches 
 were left empty while honourable members ran after one another, tum- 
 bling over each other in their haste to shake hands with the honourable and 
 learned member.' Mr. Cockburn's career was safe from that hour. It is 
 needless to say that he well upheld in after years the reputation he won 
 in a night. The brilliant and sudden success of the member for South- 
 ampton was but the fitting prelude to the abiding distinction won by the 
 Lord Chief Justice of England. 
 
 One association of profound melancholy clings to that great debate. 
 The speech delivered by Sir Robert Peel was the last that was destined to 
 come from his lips. The debate closed on the morning of Saturday June 
 29. It was nearly four o'clock when the division was taken, and Peel left 
 the house as the sunlight was already beginning to stream into the corri- 
 dors and lobbies. He went home to rest ; but his sleep could not be long. 
 He had to attend a meeting of the Royal Commissioners of the Groat 
 Industrial Exhibition at twelve, and the meeting was important. The site 
 of the building had to be decided upon, and Prince Albert and the Com- 
 missioners generally relied greatly on the influence of Sir Robert Peel to 
 sustain them against the clamorous objection out of doors to the choice of 
 a place in Hyde Park. Peel went to the mooting and undertook to assume 
 the leading part in defending the decision of the Commissioners before the 
 House of Commons. lie returned home for n short time after the meeting 
 and then set out for a ride in the Park. lie called at Buckingham 
 Palace and wrote his name in the Queen's visiting book. Tlion as he was 
 riding up Constitution Hill he stopped to talk to a young lady, a friend of
 
 ,850 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 267 
 
 his, who was also riding. His horse suddenly shied and flung him off; 
 nnd Peel clinging to the bridle, the animal fell with its knees on his 
 shoulders. The injuries which he received proved beyond all skill of sur- 
 gery. He lingered, now conscious, now delirious with pain, for two or 
 three days ; and he died about eleven o'clock on the night of July 2. 
 Most of the members of his family and some of his dearest old friends and 
 companions in political arms were beside him when he died. The tears 
 of the Duke of Wellington in one House of Parliament, and the eloquence 
 of Mr. Gladstone in the other, were expressions as fitting and adequate as 
 might be of the universal feeling of the nation. 
 
 There was no honour which Parliament and the country would not 
 willingly have paid to the memory of Peel. Lord John Russell proposed 
 with the sanction of the Crown that his remains should be buried with 
 public honours. But Peel had distinctly declared in his will that he 
 desired his remains to lie beside those of his father and mother in the 
 family vault at Drayton Bassett. All that Parliament and the country 
 could do therefore was to decree a monument to him in Westminster 
 Abbey. The offer of a peerage was made to Lady Peel, but, as might 
 perhaps have been expected, it was declined. Lady Peel declared that 
 her own desire was to bear no other name than that by which her husband 
 had been known. She also explained that the express wish of her husband, 
 recorded in his will, was that no member of his family should accept any 
 title or other reward on account of any services Peel might have rendered 
 to his country. No desire could have been more honourable to the states- 
 man who had formed and expressed it ; none certainly more in keeping 
 with all that was known of the severely unselfish and unostentatious 
 character of Sir Robert Peel. Yet there were persons found to miscon- 
 strue his meaning and to discover offence to the order of aristocracy in 
 Peel's determination. A report went about that the great statesman's 
 objection to the acceptance of a peerage by one of his family implied a 
 disparagement of the order of peers and was founded on feelings of con- 
 tempt or hostility to the House of Lords. Mr. Goulburn, who was one 
 of Peel's executors, easily explained Peel's meaning, if indeed it needed 
 explanation to any reasonable mind. Peel was impressed with the convic- 
 tion that it was better for a man to be the son of his own works ; and he 
 desired that his sons, if they were to bear titles and distinctions given them 
 by the State, should win them by their own services and worth, and not 
 simply put them on as an inheritance from their lather. As regards him- 
 self, it may well be that he thought the name under which he had made 
 his reputation became him better than any new title. He had not looked 
 for reward of that kind, and might well prefer to mark the fact that he
 
 268 A IIISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xix. 
 
 did not specially value such distinctions. Nor would it be any disparage- 
 ment to the peerage a thing which in the case of a man with Peel's 
 opinions is utterly out of the question to think that much of the dignity 
 of a title depends on its long descent and its historic record, and that a fire- 
 new, specially invented title to a man already great is a disfigurement, or 
 at least a disguise, rather than an adornment. When titles were abolished 
 during the great French Devolution, Mirabeau complained of being called 
 ' Citizen Riquetti ' in the official reports of the Assembly. ' With your 
 Riquetti,' he said angrily, ' you have puzzled all Europe for days.' Europe 
 knew Count Mirabeau, but was for some time bewildered by Citizen 
 Riquetti. Sir Robert Peel may well have objected to a reversal of the 
 process, and to the bewildering of Europe by disguising a famous citizen 
 in a new peerage. 
 
 ' Peel's death,' Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after, 
 putting the remark at the close of a long letter about the recent victory ol 
 the Government and the congratulations he had personally received, ' is a 
 great calamity, and one that seems to have had no adequate cause. He 
 was a very bad and awkward rider, and his horse might have been sat 
 by any better equestrian ; but he seems somehow or other to have been 
 entangled in the bridle, and to have pulled the horse to step or kneel upon 
 him. The injury to the shoulder was severe but curable ; that which 
 killed him was a broken rib forced with great violence inwards into the 
 lungs.' The cause of Peel's death would certainly not have been adequate, 
 as Lord Palmerston put it, if great men needed prodigious and portentous 
 events to bring about their end. But the stumble of a horse has been 
 found enough in other instances too. Peel seemed destined for great 
 things yet when he died. He was but in his sixty-third year ; he was 
 some years younger than Lord Palmerston, who may be said without ex- 
 aggeration to have just achieved his first great success. Many circumstances 
 were pointing to Peel as likely before long to be summoned again to the 
 leadership in the government of the country. It is superfluous to say that 
 his faculties as Parliamentary orator or statesman were not showing any 
 signs of decay. An English public man is not supposed to show signs of 
 decaying faculties at sixty-two. The shying horse and perhaps the bad 
 ridership settled the question of Peel's career between them. We have 
 already endeavoured to estimate that career and to do justice to Peel's 
 great qualities. He was not a man of original genius, but he was one of 
 the best administrators of other men's ideas that ever knew how and when 
 to leave a party and to serve a country. He was never tried by the severe 
 tests which tell whether a man is a statesman of the highest order. lie 
 was never tried as Cavour, for example, was tried, by conditions which
 
 1860. A HIST011Y OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 placed the national existence of his country in jeopardy, lie had no such 
 trials to encounter as were forced on Pitt, lie was the minister of a 
 country always peaceful, safe, and prosperous. But he was called upon at 
 a trying moment to take a step on which assuredly much of the prosperity 
 of the people and nearly all the hopes of his party along with his own per- 
 sonal reputation were imperilled. He did not want courage to take the 
 step, and he had the judgment to take it at the right time. He bore the 
 reproaches of that which had been his party with dignity and composure. 
 He was undoubtedly, as Lord Beaconsfield calls him, a great member of 
 Parliament ; but he was surely also a great minister. Perhaps he only 
 needed a profounder trial at the hands of fate to have earned the title of a 
 great man. 
 
 To the same year belongs the close of another remarkable career. On 
 August 26, 1850, Louis Philippe, lately King of the French, died at Clare- 
 mont, the guest of England. Few men in history had gone through greater 
 reverses. Son of Philippe Egalite, brought up in a sort of blending of 
 luxury and scholastic self-denial, under the contrasting influence of his 
 father and of his teacher, Madame de Genlis, a woman full at least of 
 virtuous precept and Rousseau-like profession, he showed great force of 
 character during the Revolution. He still regarded France as his country, 
 though she no longer gave a throne to any of his family. lie had fought 
 like a brave young soldier at Valmy and Jemappes. ' Egalite Fils,' 
 Bays Carlyle, speaking of the young man at Valmy -' Equality Junior, a 
 light, gallant field-officer, distinguished himself by intrepidity ; it is the 
 same intrepid individual who now, as Louis Philippe, without the Equality, 
 struggles under sad circumstances to be called King of the French for a 
 season.' It is he who, as Carlyle also describes it, saves his sister with 
 such spirit and energy when Madame de Genlis with all her fine precepts 
 would have left her behind to whatever danger. ' Behold the young 
 Princely Brother, struggling hitherward, hastily calling ; bearing the 
 Princess in his arms. Hastily he has clutched the poor young lady up, 
 in her very nightgown, nothing saved of her goods except the watch from 
 the pillow ; with brotherly despair he flings her in, among the band-boxes, 
 into Genlis's chaise, into Genlis's arms. . . . The brave young Egalite has 
 a most wild morrow to look for ; but now only himself to carry through 
 it.' The brave young Egalite had indeed a wild time before him. A 
 wanderer, an exile, a fugitive, a teacher in Swiss and American schools ; 
 bearing many and various names as he turned to many callings and saw 
 many lands, always perhaps keeping in mind that Danton had laid hi* 
 great hand upon his head and declared that the boy must one day be King 
 of France. Then in the whirligig of time the opportunity that long might
 
 270 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xix. 
 
 have seemed impossible came round at last ; and the soldier, exile, college 
 teacher, wanderer among American-Indian tribes, resident of Philadelphia, 
 and of Bloomingdale in the New York suburbs, is King of the French. 
 Well had Carlyle gauged his position after some years of reign when he 
 described him ' as struggling under sad circumstances to be called King of 
 the French for a season.' He ought to have been a great man; he had 
 had a great training. All his promise as a man faded when his seeming 
 success began to shine. He had apparently learned nothing of adversity ; 
 he was able to learn nothing of prosperity and greatness. Of all men 
 whom his time had tried he ought best to have known, one might think, 
 the vanity of human schemes, and the futility of trying to uphold thrones 
 on false principles. He intrigued for power as if his previous experience 
 had taught him that power once obtained was inalienable. He seemed at 
 one time to have no real faith in anything but chicane. He made the 
 fairest professions and did the meanest, falsest things. He talked to Queen 
 Victoria in language that might have brought tears into a father's eyes; 
 and he was all the time planning the detestable juggle of the Spanish 
 marriages. He did not even seem to retain the courage of his youth. It 
 went apparently with whatever of true, unselfish principle he had when he 
 was yet a young soldier of the Eepublic. He was like our own James II., 
 who as a youth extorted the praise of the great Turenne for his bravery, 
 and as a king earned the scorn of the world for his pusillanimous imbe- 
 cility. Some people say that there remained a gleam of perverted prin- 
 ciple in Louis Philippe which broke out just at the close, and unluckily 
 for him exactly at the wrong time. It is asserted that he could have put 
 down the movement of 1848 in the beginning with one decisive word. 
 Certainly those who began that movement were as little prepared as he 
 for its turning out a revolution. It is generally assumed that he halted 
 and dallied and refused to give the word of command out of sheer weak- 
 ness of mind and lack of courage. But the assumption according to some 
 is unjust. Their theory is that Louis Philippe at that moment of crisis 
 was seized with a conscientious scruple, and believed that having been 
 called to power by the choice of the people called to rule not as King of 
 France, but as King of the French ; as King, that is to say, of the French 
 people so long as they chose to have him he was not authorised to main- 
 tain himself on that throne by force. The feeling would have been just 
 and right if it were certain that the French people, or any majority of the 
 French people, really wished him away and were prepared to welcome a 
 republic. But it was hardly fair to those who set him on the throne to 
 assume at once that he was bound to come down from it at the bidding of 
 no matter whom, how few or how many, and without in some way trying
 
 I860. A HISTORY OF OUK, OWN TIMES. 271 
 
 conclusions to see if it were the voice of France that summon ed him to 
 descend, or only the outcry of a moment and a crowd. The scruple, if it 
 existed, lost the throne ; in which we are far from saying that France 
 suffered any great loss. We are bound to say that M. Thiers, who ought 
 to have known, does not seem to have believed in the operation of any 
 scruple of the kind, and ascribes the King's fall simply to blundering and 
 to bad advice. But it would have been curiously illustrative of the odd 
 contradictions of human nature, and especially curious as illustrating that 
 one very odd and mixed nature, if Louis Philippe had really felt such a 
 scruple and yielded to it. He had carried out with full deliberation, and 
 in spite of all remonstrance, schemes which, tore asunder human lives, 
 blighted human happiness, played at dice with the destinies of whole nations 
 and might have involved all Europe in war, and it does not seem that he 
 ever felt one twinge of scruple or acknowledged one pang of remorse. His 
 policy had been unutterably mean and selfish and deceitful. His very 
 bourgeois virtues, on which he was so much inclined to boast himself, had 
 been a sham ; for he had carried out schemes which defied and flouted the 
 first principles of human virtue, and made as light of the honour of women 
 as of the integrity of man. It would humour the irony of fate if he had 
 sacrificed his crown to a scruple which a man of really high principle 
 would well have felt justified in banishing from his mind. One is re- 
 minded of the daughter of Macklin, the famous actor, who having made 
 her success on the stage by appearing constantly in pieces which compelled 
 the most liberal display of form and limbs to all the house and all the 
 town, died of a slight injury to her knee, which she allowed to grow mortal 
 rather than permit any doctor to look at the suffering place. In Louia 
 Philippe's case, too, the scruple would show so oddly that even the sacri- 
 fice it entailed could scarcely make us regard it with respect. 
 
 He died in exile among us, the clever, unwise, grand, mean old man. 
 There was a great deal about him which made him respected in private 
 life, and Avhen he had nothing to do with state intrigues and the foreign 
 policy of courts. lie was much liked in England, where for many yeara 
 after his sons lived. But there were Englishmen who did not like him 
 and did not readily forgive him. One of these was Lord Pahnerston. 
 Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after the death of Louis 
 Philippe, expressing his sentiments thereupon with the utmost directness. 
 ' The death of Louis Philippe,' he said, ' delivers me from my most artful 
 and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him in many ways the power 
 to injure me.' Louis Philippe always detested Lord Palmerston, and, 
 according to Thiers, was constantly saying witty and spiteful things of the 
 English Minister, which good-natiired friends as constantly brought to
 
 272 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xix 
 
 Palmerston's ears. When Lord Palmerston did not feel exactly as a good 
 Christian ought to have felt, he at least never pretended to any such 
 feeling. The same letter contains immediately after a reference to Sir 
 Robert Peel. It too is characteristic. ' Though I am sorry for the death 
 of Peel from personal regard, and because it is no doubt a great loss to the 
 country, yet, so far as my own political position is concerned, I do not 
 think that he was ever disposed to do me any good turn.' A little while 
 before, Prince Albert, writing to his friend Baron Stockmar, had spoken 
 of Peel as having somewhat unduly favoured Palmerston's foreign policy 
 in the great Pacifico debate, or at least not having borne as severely as he 
 might upon it, and for a certainly not selfish reason. ' He ' (Peel) ' could 
 not call the policy good, and yet he did not wish to damage the Ministry, 
 and this solely because he considered that a Protectionist Ministry succeed- 
 ing them would be dangerous to the country, and had quite determined 
 not to take office himself. But would the fact that his health no longer 
 admitted of his doing so have been sufficient as time went on to make his 
 followers and friends bear with patient resignation their own permanent 
 exclusion from office ? I doubt it.' The Prince might well doubt it : if 
 Peel had lived, it is all but certain that he would have had to take office. 
 It is curious, however, to notice how completely Prince Albert and Lord 
 Palmerston are at odds in their way of estimating Peel's political attitude 
 before his death. Lord Palmerston's quiet way of setting Peel down as 
 one who would never be disposed to do him a good turn is characteristic 
 of the manner in which the Foreign Secretary went in for the game of 
 politics. Palmerston was a man of kindly instincts and genial tempera- 
 ment. He was much loved by his friends. His feelings were always 
 directing him towards a certain half-indolent benevolence. But the game 
 of politics was to him like the hunting field. One cannot stop to help a 
 friend out of a ditch or to lament over him if he is down and seriously 
 injured. For the hour the only thing is to keep on one's way. In the 
 political game Lord Palmerston was playing, enemies were only obstacles, 
 and it would be absurd to pretend to be sorry when they were out of his 
 path. Therefore, there is no affectation of generous regret for Louis 
 Philippe. Political rivals, even if private friends, are something like 
 obstacles too. Palmerston is of opinion that Peel would never be disposed 
 to do him a good turn, and therefore indulges in no sentimental regret for 
 his death. He is a loss to the country, no doubt, and personally one is 
 sorry for him, of course, and all that : ' which done, God take King Edward 
 to his mercy, and leave the world for me to bustle in.' The world certainly 
 was more free henceforth for Lord Palmerston's active and unresting spirit 
 to bustle in.
 
 1850. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 273 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 
 
 THE autumn of 1850 and the greater part of 1851 were disturbed by an 
 agitation which seems strangely out of keeping with our present condition 
 of religious liberty and civilisation. A struggle with the Papal Court 
 might appear to be a practical impossibility for the England of our time. 
 The mind has to go back some centuries to put itself into what would appear 
 the proper framework for such events. Legislation or even agitation against 
 Papal aggression would seem about as superfluous in our modern English 
 days as the use of any of the once-popular charms which were believed to 
 hinder witches of their will. The story is extraordinary, and is in many 
 ways instructive. 
 
 For some time previous to 1850 there had been, as we have seen already, 
 a certain movement among some scholarly, mystical men in England towards 
 the Roman Church. We have already shown how this movement began, 
 and how little it could fairly be said to represent any actual impulse of 
 reaction among the English people. But it unquestionably made a pro- 
 found impression in Rome. The court of Rome then saw everything 
 through the eyes of ecclesiastics; and a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic not 
 well acquainted with the actual conditions of English life might well be 
 excused if, when he found that two or three great Englishmen had gone 
 over to the Church, he fancied that they were but the vanguard of a vast 
 popular or national movement. It is clear that the court of Rome was 
 quite mistaken as to the religious condition of England. The most chimeri- 
 cal notions prevailed in the Vatican. To the eyes of Papal enthusiasm the 
 whole English nation was only waiting for some word in season to return 
 to the spiritual jurisdiction of Rome. The Pope had not been fortunate in 
 many things. He had been a fugitive from his own city, and had been 
 restored only by the force of French arms. He was a thoroughly good, 
 pious and genial man, not seeing far into the various ways of human 
 thought and national character ; and to his mind there was nothing un- 
 reasonable in the idea that heaven might have made up for the domestic 
 disasters of his reign by making him the instrument of the conversion of 
 England. No better proof can be given of the manner in which he and 
 his advisers misunderstood the English people than the step with which 
 his sanguine zeal inspired him. The English people, even while they yet 
 bowed to the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy, were always keenly jealous 
 ot any ecclesiastical attempt to control the political action or restrict the 
 
 VOL I. T
 
 274 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xx. 
 
 national independence of England. The history of the relations between 
 England and Rome for long generations before England had any thought 
 of renouncing the faith of Rome might have furnished ample proof of this 
 to anyone who gave himself the trouble to turn over a few pages of English 
 chronicles. The Pope did not read English, and his advisers did not under- 
 stand England. Accordingly he took a step, with the view of encouraging 
 and inviting England to become converted, which was calculated specially 
 and in.stantly to defeat its own purpose. Had the great majority of the 
 English people been really drawing towards the verge of a reaction to Rome, 
 such an act as that done by the Pope might have startled them back to 
 their old attitude. The assumption of Papal authority over England only 
 filled the English people with a new determination to repudiate and resist 
 every pretension at spiritual authority on the part of the court of Rome. 
 
 The time has so completely passed away, and the supposed pretensions 
 have come to so little, that the most zealous Protestant can afford to discuss 
 the whole question now with absolute impartiality and unruffled calmness. 
 Everyone can clearly see now that if the Pope was mistaken in the course 
 he took, and if the nation in general was amply justified in resenting even 
 a supposed attempt at foreign interference, the piece of legislation to which 
 the occasion gave birth was not a masterpiece of statesmanship, nor was 
 the manner in which it was carried through always creditable to the good 
 sense of Parliament and the public. The papal aggression in itself was 
 perhaps a measure to smile at rather than to arouse great national indigna- 
 tion. It consisted in the issue of a papal bull, ' given at St. Peter's, Rome, 
 under the seal of the fisherman,' and directing the establishment in England 
 ' of a hierarchy of bishops deriving their titles from their own sees, which 
 we constitute by the present letter in the various apostolic districts.' It i? 
 a curious evidence of the little knowledge of England's condition possessed 
 by the Court of Rome then, that although five-sixths at least of the Catho- 
 lics in England were Irish by birth or extraction, the newly-appointed 
 bishops were all, or nearly all, Englishmen unconnected with Ireland. 
 
 An Englishman of the present day would be probably inclined to ask, 
 on hearing the effect of the bull, Is that all 1 Being told that that wa? 
 all, he would probably have gone on to ask, What does it matter 1 Who 
 cares whether the Pope gives new titles to his English ecclesiastics or not 1 
 What Protestant is even interested in knowing whether a certain Catholic 
 bishop living in England is called bishop of Mesopotamia, or of Lambeth 1 
 There always were Catholic bishops in England. There were Catholic 
 archbishops. They were free to go and come, to preach and teach as they 
 liked ; to dress as they liked ; for all that nineteen out of every twenty 
 Englishmen cared, they might have been also free to call themselves what
 
 18,50. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 275 
 
 they liked. Any Protestant who mixed with Roman Catholics, or knew 
 anything about their usages, know that they were in the habit of calling 
 their bishops ' my lord,' and their archbishops 'your grace-.' He knew of 
 course that they had not the slightest legal right to use such high-sounding 
 titles, but this did not trouble him in the least. It was only a ceremonial 
 intended for Catholics, and it did not give him either offence or concern. 
 Why then should he be expected to disturb his mind because the Pope 
 chose to direct that the English Roman Catholics should call a man Bishop 
 of Liverpool or Archbishop of Westminster? The Pope could not compel 
 him to call them by any such names if he did not think fit; and unless 
 his attention had been very earnestly drawn to the fact, he never probably 
 would have found out that any new titles had been invented for the 
 Catholic hierarchy in England. 
 
 This was the way in which a great many p]nglishmen regarded the 
 matter even then. But it must be owned that there was something about 
 the time and manner of the papal bull calculated to offend the suscepti- 
 bility of a great and independent nation. The mere fact that a certain 
 movement towards Rome had been painfully visible in the ranks of the 
 English Church itself was enough to make people sensitive and jealous. 
 The plain sense of many thoroughly impartial and cool-headed English- 
 men showed them that the two things were connected in the mind of the 
 Pope, and that he had issued his bull because he thought the time was 
 actually coming when he might begin to take measures for the spiritual 
 annexation of England. His pretensions might be of no account in them- 
 selves; but the fact that he made them in the evident belief that they 
 were justified by realities, produced a jarring and painful effect on the 
 mind of England. The offence lay in the Pope's evident assumption that 
 the change he was making was the natural result of an actual change in 
 the national feeling of England. The anger was not against the giving of 
 the new titles, but against the assumption of a new right to give titles 
 representing territorial distinctions in this country. The agitation that 
 sprang up was fiercely heated by the pastoral letter of the chief of the new 
 hierarchy. The Pope had divided England into various dioceses, which 
 he placed under the control of an archbishop and twelve suffragans : and 
 the new archbishop was Cardinal Wiseman. Under the title of Area- 
 bishop of Westminster and Administrator Apostolic of the Diocese of 
 Southwark, Cardinal Wiseman was now to reside in London. Cardinal 
 Wiseman was already well known in England. He was of English descent 
 on his father's side and of Irish on his mother's; he was a Spaniard by 
 birth and a Roman by education. His family on both sides was of good 
 position ; his father came of a long line of Essex gentry. Wiseman had 
 
 T 2
 
 276 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cir. xx. 
 
 held the professorship of Oriental languages in the. English College at 
 Rome, and afterwards became rector of the college. In 1840 he wns 
 appointed by the Pope one of the Vicars Apostolic in England, and held 
 his position here as Bishop of Melipotamus in partibus infidelium. He 
 was well known to be a fine scholar, an accomplished linguist, and a 
 powerful preacher and controversialist. But he was believed also to be a 
 man of great ecclesiastical ambition ambition for his Church, that is to 
 say of singular boldness, and of much political ability. The Pope's 
 action was set down as in great measure the work of Wiseman. The 
 Cardinal himself was accepted in the minds of most Englishmen as a 
 type of the regular Italian ecclesiastic bold, clever, ambitious, and 
 unscrupulous. The very fact of his English extraction only militated 
 the more against him in the public feeling. He was regarded as in some 
 sense one who had gone over to the enemy, and who was the more to be 
 dreaded because of the knowledge he carried with him. Perhaps it is not 
 too much to say that in the existing mood of the English people the very 
 title of Cardinal exasperated the feeling against Wiseman. Had he come 
 as a simple archbishop, the aggression might not have seemed so marked. 
 The title of Cardinal brought back unwelcome memories to the English 
 public. It reminded them of a period of their history when the forces of 
 Rome and those of the national independence were really arrayed against 
 each other in a struggle which Englishmen might justly look on as 
 dangerous. Since those times there had been no cardinal in England. 
 Did it not look ominous that a cardinal should present himself now ? The 
 first .step taken by Cardinal Wiseman did not tend to charm away this 
 feeling. He issued a pastoral letter, addressed to England, on October 7, 
 1850, whish was set forth as ' given out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome.' 
 This description of the letter was afterwards stated to be in accordance 
 with one of the necessary formularies of the Church of Rome; but it was 
 then assumed in England to be an expression of insolence and audacity 
 intended to remind the English people that from out of Rome itself came 
 the assertion of supremacy over them. This letter was to be read publicly 
 in all the Roman Catholic churches in London. It addressed itself directly 
 to the English people, and it announced that ' your beloved country has 
 received a place among the fair churches which normally constituted form 
 the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion; Catholic England has 
 been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its 
 light had long vanished ; and begins nov/ anew its course of regTilarly- 
 adjusted action round the; centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of 
 light, and of vigour.' 
 
 It must be allowed that this "* rather imprudent language to address
 
 1850. A HISTORY OF OUJi OWN TIAIKS. 277 
 
 to :i people peculiarly proud of being Protestant; a people of whom their 
 critics say, not wholly without reason, that they are somewhat narrow and 
 unsympathetic in their Protestantism ; that their national tendency is to 
 believe in the existence of nothing really good outside the limits of Pro- 
 testantism. In England the National Church is a symbol of victory over 
 foreign enemies and domination at home. It was not likely that the 
 English people could regard it as anything but an offence to be told that 
 they were resuming their place as a part of an ecclesiastical system to 
 which they, of all peoples, looked with dislike and distrust. We are not 
 saying that the feeling with which the great bulk of the English people 
 regarded Cardinal Wiseman's Church was just or liberal. We are simply 
 recording the unquestionable historical fact that such was the manner in 
 which the English people regarded the Roman Church, in order to show 
 how slender was the probability of their being moved to anything but 
 anger by such expressions as those contained in Cardinal Wiseman's letter. 
 But the letter had hardly reached England when the country was aroused 
 by another letter coming from a very different quarter, and intended as a 
 counterblast to the papal assumption of authority. This was Lord John 
 Russell's famous Durham letter. Russell had the art of writing letters 
 that exploded like bomb-shells in the rnidst of some controvery. II is 
 Edinburgh letter had set the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel on to recognise 
 the fact that something must be done with the Free Trade question ; and 
 now his Durham letter spoke the word that let loose a very torrent of 
 English public feeling. The letter was in reply to one from the Bishop 
 of Durham, and was dated ' Downing Street, November the 4th.' Lord 
 John Russell condemned in the most unmeasured terms the assumption of 
 the Pope as ' a pretension of supremacy over the realm of England, and 
 a claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the Queen's 
 supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiritual 
 independence of the nation as asserted even in the Roman Catholic times.' 
 Lord John Russell went on to say that his alarm was by no means equal 
 to his indignation ; that the liberty of Protestantism had been enjoyed 
 too long in England to allow of any successful attempt to impose a foreign 
 yoke upon men's minds and consciences, and that the laws of the country 
 should be carefully examined, and the propriety of adopting some addi 
 tional measures deliberately considered. But Lord John Russell went 
 further than all this. lie declared that there Avas a danger that alarmed 
 him more than any aggression from a foreign sovereign, and that was; 'the 
 danger within the gates from the unworthy sons of the Church of England 
 herself.' Clergymen of that Church, he declared, had been ' leading their 
 flocks step by step to the verge of the precipice.' What, he asked, meant
 
 278 A HISTOKY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. xx. 
 
 ' the honour paid to saints, the claim of infallibility for the Church, the 
 superstitious use of the sign of the Cross, the muttering of the Liturgy 
 so as to disguise the language in which it is written, the recommendation 
 of auricular confession, and the administration of penance and absolution?' 
 The letter closed with a sentence which gave especial offence to Roman 
 Catholics, but which Lord John Russell afterwards explained, and indeed 
 the context ought to have shown, was not meant as any attack on their 
 religion or their ceremonial. ' I have little hope that the propounders 
 and Iramers of these innovations will desist from their insidious course ; 
 but I rely with confidence on the people of England ; and I will not bate 
 one jot of heart or hope so long as the glorious principles and the immortal 
 martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence by the great mass 
 of a nation which looks with contempt on the mummeries of superstition 
 and with scorn at the laborious endeavours which are now making to 
 confine the intellect and enslave the soul.' It is now clear from the very 
 terms of this letter that Lord John Russell meant to apply these words to 
 the practices within the English Church which he had so strongly con- 
 demned in the earlier passages, and which alone, he said, he regarded 
 with any serious alarm. But the Roman Catholics in general and the 
 majority of persons of all sects accepted them as a denunciation of ' Popery.' 
 The Catholics looked upon them as a declaration of war against Catho- 
 licism; the fanatical of the other side welcomed them as a trumpet-call 
 to a new ' No Popery ' agitation. 
 
 The very day after the letter appeared was the Guy Faux anniversary. 
 All over the country the effigies of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman took 
 the place of the regulation ' Guy,' and were paraded and burnt amid 
 tumultuous demonstrations. A colossal procession of ' Guys ' passed 
 down Fleet Street, the principal figure of which, a gigantic form of six- 
 teen feet high, seated in a chariot, had to be bent down, compelled to 
 ' veil his crest,' in order to pass under Temple Bar. This Titanic ' Guy' 
 was the new cardinal in his red robes. In Exeter a yet more elaborate 
 Anti-papal demonstration was made. A procession of two hundred 
 persons in character-dresses marched round the venerable cathedral arnid 
 the varied effulgence of coloured lights. The procession represented the 
 Pope, the new cardinal, and the Inquisition, various of the Inquisitors 
 brandishing instruments of torture. Considerable sums of money were 
 spent on these popular demonstrations, the only interest in which now is 
 that they serve to illustrate the public sentiment of the hour. Mr. Disraeli 
 good-naturedly endeavoured at once to foment the prevailing heat of public 
 temper and at the same time to direct its fervour against the Ministry 
 themselves, by declaring in a published letter that he could hardly blame
 
 I860. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 27 9 
 
 the Pope for supposing himself at liberty to divide England into bishoprics, 
 seeing the encouragement he had got from the ministers themselves by 
 the recognition they had offered to the Roman Catholic hierarchy of 
 Ireland. ' The fact is,' Mr. Disraeli said, ' the whole question has been 
 surrendered and decided in favour of the Pope by the present Govern- 
 ment. The ministers who recognised the pseudo-Archbishop of Tuam as 
 a peer and a prelate cannot object to the appointment of a pseudo- Arch- 
 bishop of Westminster, even though he be a cardinal.' As a matter of 
 fact, it was not the existing Government that had recognised the rank of 
 the Irish Catholic prelates. The recognition had been formally arranged 
 in January 1845 by a royal warrant or commission for carrying out the 
 Charitable Bequests Act, which gave the Irish Catholic prelates rank imme- 
 diately after the prelates of the Established Church of the same degree. 
 But the letter of Mr. Disraeli, like that of Lord John Russell, served to 
 inflame passions on both sides and to put the country in the worst possible 
 mood for any manner of wholesome legislation. Never during the same 
 generation had there been such an outburst of anger on both sides of the 
 religious controversy. It was a curious incident in political history that 
 Lord John Russell, who had more than any Englishman then living been 
 identified with the principles of religious liberty, who had sat at the feet 
 of Fox, and had for his closest friend the Catholic poet Thomas Moore, 
 came to be regarded by Roman Catholics as the bitterest enemy of their 
 creed and their rights of worship. 
 
 The Ministry felt that something must be done. They could not face 
 Parliament without some piece of legislation to satisfy public feeling. 
 Many even among the most zealous Protestants deeply regretted that Lord 
 John Russell had written anything on the subject. Not a few Roman 
 Catholics of position and influence bitterly lamented the indiscretion of 
 the Papal court. The mischief, however, was now fairly afoot. The step 
 taken by the Pope had set the country aflame. Every day crowded and 
 tumultuous meetings were held to denounce the action of the court of 
 Rome. Before the end of the year something like seven thousand such 
 meetings had been held throughout the kingdom. Sometimes the Roman 
 Catholic party mustered strong at such demonstrations, and the result was 
 rioting and disturbance. Addresses poured in upon the Queen and the 
 ministers calling for decided action against the assumption of Papal 
 authority. About the same time Father Gavazzi, an Italian republican 
 who had been a priest, came to London and began a series of lectures 
 against the Papacy. He was a man of great rhetorical power, with a 
 remarkable command of the eloquence of passion and denunciation. His 
 lectures were at first given only in Italian, and therefore did not appeal tc
 
 280 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xx. 
 
 a popular English audience. But they were reported in the papers at 
 much length, and they contributed not a little to swell the tide of public 
 feeling against the Pope and the court of Home. The new Lord Chan- 
 cellor, Lord Truro, created great applau.se and tumult at the Lord Mayor's 
 dinner by quoting from Shakespeare the words, ' Under my feet I'll stamp 
 thy Cardinal's hat, in spite of Pope or dignities of Church.' Charles 
 Kean, the tragedian, was interrupted by thundering peals of applause and 
 the rising of the whole audience to their feet when, as King John, he 
 proclaimed that ' no Italian priest shall tithe or toll in our dominion.' 
 Long afterwards, and when the storm seemed to have wholly died away, 
 Cardinal Wiseman, going in a carriage through the streets of Liverpool 
 to deliver a lecture on a purely literary subject to a general audience, was 
 pelted with stones by a mob who remembered the Papal assumption and 
 the passions excited by the Ecclesiastical Titles Act. 
 
 The opening of Parliament came. The Ministry had to do something. 
 No Ministry that ever held power in England could have attempted to 
 meet the House of Commons without some project of a measure to allay 
 public excitement. On February 4, 1851, the Queen in person opened 
 Parliament. Her speech contained some sentences which were listened to 
 with the profoundest interest because they referred to the question which 
 was agitating all England. ' The recent assumption of certain ecclesias- 
 tical titles conferred by a foreign Power has excited strong feelings in this 
 country ; and large bodies of my subjects have presented addresses to me 
 expressing attachment to the throne and praying that such assumptions 
 should be resisted. I have assured them of my resolution to maintain 
 the rights of my crown and the independence of the nation against all 
 encroachments, from whatever quarter they may proceed. I have at the 
 same time expressed my earnest desire and firm determination, under 
 God's blessing, to maintain unimpaired the religious liberty which is so 
 justly prized by the people of this country/ How little of inclination to 
 any measures dealing unfairly with Koman Catholics was in the mind of 
 the Queen herself may be seen from a letter in which, when the excite- 
 ment was at its height, she had expressed her opinion to her aunt, the 
 Duchess of Gloucester. ' I would never have consented to anything 
 which breathed a spirit of intolerance. Sincerely Protestant as I always 
 have been, and always *hall be, and indignant as I am at those who call 
 themselves Protestants while they are in fact quite the contrary, I much 
 regret the unchristian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at 
 the public meetings. I cannot bear to hear the violent abuse of the 
 Catholic religion, which is so painful and so cruel towards the many good 
 and innocent Roman Catholics. However, we must hope and trust this
 
 i51. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 281 
 
 excitement will soon cease, and that the wholesome effect of it upon our 
 own Chiirch will be lasting.' 
 
 ' The Papal aggression question,' Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother 
 just before the opening of Parliament 'will give us some trouble, and 
 give rise to stormy debates. Our difficulty will be to find out a measure 
 which shall satisfy reasonable Protestants without violating those principles 
 of liberal toleration which we are pledged to. I think we shall succeed. 
 . . . The thing itself, in truth, is little or nothing, and does not justify 
 the irritation. What has goaded the nation is the manner, insolent and 
 ostentatious, in which it has been done. . . . We must bring in a mea- 
 sure. The country would not be satisfied without some legislative enact- 
 ment. We shall make it as gentle as possible. The violent party will 
 object to it for its mildness, and will endeavour to drive us farther.' A 
 measure brought in only because something must be done to satisfy public 
 opinion is not likely to be a very valuable piece of legislation. The 
 Ministry in this case were embarrassed by the fact that they really did 
 not particularly want to do anything except to satisfy public opinion for 
 the moment and get rid of all the controversy. They were placed between 
 two galling fires. On the one side were the extreme Protestants, to 
 whom Palmerston alluded as violent, and who were eager for severe 
 measures against the Catholics ; and on the other were the Roman Catholic 
 supporters of the Ministry, who protested against any legislation whatever 
 on the subject. It would have been simply impossible to find any safe 
 and satisfactory path of compromise which all could consent to walk. 
 The Ministry did the best they could to frame a measure which should 
 seem to do something and yet do little or nothing. Two or three 
 days after the meeting of Parliament Lord John Russell introduced his 
 bill to prevent the assumption by Roman Catholics of titles taken from 
 any territory or place within the United Kingdom. The measure pro- 
 posed to prohibit the use of all such titles under penalty, and to render 
 void all acts done by or bequests made to persons under such titles. The 
 Roman Catholic Relief Act imposed a penalty of one hundred pounds lor 
 every assumption of a title taken from an existing see. Lord John 
 Russell proposed now to extend the penalty to the assumption of any title 
 whatever from any place in the United Kingdom. The reception which 
 was given to Lord John Russell's motion for leave to bring in this bill 
 was not encouraging. Usually leave to bring in a bill is granted as a 
 matter of course. Some iew general observations of extemporaneous 
 and guarded criticism are often made ; but the common practice is to 
 offer no opposition. On this occasion, however, it was at once made mani- 
 fest that no measure, however ' gentle,' to use Lord Palmerston's word,
 
 282 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xx. 
 
 would be allowed to pass without obstinate opposition. Mr. Roebuck 
 described the bill as ' one of the meanest, pettiest, and most futile mea- 
 sures that ever disgraced even bigotry itself'.' Mr. Bright called it ' little, 
 paltry, and miserable a mere sham to bolster up Church ascendancy.' 
 Mr. Disraeli declared that he would not oppose the introduction of the 
 bill ; but he spoke of it in language of as much contempt as Mr. Roe- 
 birjk and Mr. Bright had used, calling it a mere piece of petty persecu- 
 tion. ' Was it for this,' Mr. Disraeli scornfully asked, ' that the Lord 
 Chancellor trampled on a cardinal's hat amid the patriotic acclamations of 
 the metropolitan municipality ? ' Sir Robert Inglis, on the part of the 
 more extreme Protestants, objected to the bill on the ground that it did 
 not go far enough. The debate on the motion for leave to bring in the 
 bill was renewed for night after night, and the fullest promise of an angry 
 and prolonged resistance was given. Yet so strong was the feeling in 
 favour of some legislation, that when the division was taken, three hun- 
 dred and ninety-five votes were given for the motion, and only sixty-three 
 against it. The opponents of the measure had on their side not only all 
 the prominent champions of religious liberty like Sir James Graham, 
 Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, and Mr. Bright, but also Protestant politicians 
 of such devotion to the interests of the Church as Mr. Roundell Palmer, 
 afterwards Lord Selborne, and Mr. Beresford Hope ; and of course they 
 had with them all the Irish Catholic members. Yet the motion for leave 
 to bring in the bill was carried by this overwhelming majority. The 
 ministers had at all events ample justification, so far as Parliamentary 
 tactics were concerned, for the introduction of their measure. 
 
 If, however, we come to regard the ministerial proposal as a piece of 
 practical legislation, the case to be made out for them is not strong, nor is 
 the abortive result of their efforts at all surprising. They set out on the 
 enterprise without any real interest in it, or any particular confidence in 
 its success. It is probable that Lord John Russell alone of all the ministers 
 had any expectation of a satisfactory result to come of the piece of legisla- 
 tion they were attempting. We have seen what Lord Palmerston thought 
 on the whole subject. The ministers were, in fact, in the difficulty of all 
 statesmen who bring in a measure, not because they themselves are clear as 
 to its necessity or its efficacy, but because they find that something must be 
 done to satisfy public feeling, and they do not know of anything better to do 
 at the moment. The history of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was therefore, 
 a history of blunder, unlucky accident, and failure from the moment it was 
 brought in xuitil its ignominious and ridiculous repeal many years after, and 
 when its absolute impotence had been not merely demonstrated but forgotten 
 The Government at first, as we have seen, resolved to impose a penalty
 
 1861. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 283 
 
 on the assumption of ecclesiastical titles by Roman Catholic prelates from 
 places in the United Kingdom, and to make null and void all acts done or 
 bequests made in virtue of such titles. But they found that it would be 
 absolutely impossible to apply such legislation to Ireland. In that country 
 a Catholic hierarchy had long been tolerated, and all the functions of a 
 icgular hierarchy had been in full and formal operation. To apply the 
 new measure to Ireland would have been virtually to repeal the Roman 
 Catholic Relief Act and restore the penal laws. On the other hand, the 
 ministers were not willing to make one law against titles for England and 
 another for Ireland. They were driven, therefore, to the course of with- 
 drawing two of the stringent clauses of the bill, and leaving it little more 
 than a mere declaration against the assumption of unlawful titles. But by 
 doing this they furnished stronger reasons for opposition to both of the two 
 very different parties who had hitherto denounced their way of dealing 
 with the crisis. Those who thought the bill did not go far enough before 
 were of course indignant at the proposal to shear it of whatever little force 
 it had originally possessed. They, on the other hand, who had opposed it 
 as a breach of the principle of religious liberty could now ridicule it with 
 all the greater effect on the ground that it violated a principle without even 
 the pretext of doing any practical good as a compensation. In the first 
 instance, the Ministry might plead that the crisis was exceptional ; that it 
 called for exceptional measures ; that something must be done ; and that 
 they could not stand on ceremony even with the principle of religious 
 liberty when the interest of the State was at stake. Now they lei't it in 
 the power of their opponents to say that they were breaking a principle for 
 the sake of introducing a nonentity. 
 
 The debates were long, fierce, and often passionate. The bill, even cut 
 down as it was, had a vast majority on its side. But some of the most 
 illustrious names in the House of Commons were recorded against it ; by 
 far the most eloquent voices in the House were raised to condemn it. The 
 Irish Roman Catholic members set up a persistent opposition to it, and up 
 to a certain period of its progress put in requisition all the forms of tin 1 
 House to impede it. This part of the story ought not to be passed over 
 without mention of the fact that among other effects produced by the 
 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, perhaps the most distinct was the creation of the 
 most worthless band of agitators who ever pretended to speak with the 
 voice of Ireland. These were the men who were called in the House ' the 
 Pope's Brass Band,' and who were regarded with as much dislike and dis- 
 trust by all intelligent Irish Catholics and Irish Nationalists as by the most 
 inveterate Tories. These men leaped into influence by their denunciations 
 of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. They were successful for a time in palming
 
 284 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xx. 
 
 themselves off as patriots upon Irish constituencies. They thundered against 
 the bill ; they put in motion every mechanism of delay and obstruction ; 
 some of them were really clever and eloquent ; most of them were loud- 
 voiced ; they had a grand and heaven-sent opportunity given to them, and 
 they made use of it. They had a leader, the once famous John Sadleir 
 This man possessed marked ability, and was further gifted with an un- 
 scrupulous audacity at least equal to his ability. He went to work delibe- 
 rately to create for himself a band of followers by whose help he might 
 mount to power. He was a financial swindler as well as a political adven- 
 turer. By means of the money he had suddenly acquired and by virtue 
 of his furious denunciations of the Anti-Catholic policy of the Government, 
 he was for a time able to work the Irish popular constituencies so as to get 
 his own followers into the House and become for the hour a sort of little 
 O'Connell. He had with him some two or three honest men, whom he 
 deluded into a belief in the sincerity of himself and his gang of swindling 
 adventurers ; and it is only fair to say that by far the most eloquent man 
 of the party appears to have been one of those on whom Sadleir was thus 
 able to impose. Mr, Sadleir's band afterwards came to sad grief. He 
 committed suicide himself to escape the punishment of his frauds ; some 
 of his associates iled to foreign countries and hid themselves under feigned 
 names. James Sadleir, brother and accomplice of John, was among these, 
 and underwent that rare mark of degradation in our days, a formal expul- 
 sion from the House of Commons. The Pope's Brass Band and its sub- 
 sequent history, culminating in the suicide on Hampstcad Heath, was 
 about the only practical result of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. 
 
 The bill, reduced in stringency as has been described, made, however, 
 some progress through the House. It was interrupted at one stnge by 
 events which had nothing to do with its history. The Government got 
 into trouble of another kind. At the opening of the session Mr. Disraeli 
 introduced a motion to the effect that the agricultural distress of the conn- 
 try called upon the Government to introduce without delay some measures 
 (or its relief. This motion was in fact the last spasmodic cry of Protection. 
 Many influential politicians still believed that the cause of Protection was 
 not wholly lost ; that a reaction was possible ; that the Free Trade: doctrine 
 would prove a failure arid have to be given up ; and they regarded Mr. 
 Disraeli's as a very important motion calling for a strenuous effort in its 
 favour. The Government treated the motion as one for restored Protection, 
 and threw all their strength into the struggle against it. They won ; but 
 only by a majority of fourteen. A lew days after, Mr. Locke King, member 
 for East Surrey, asked for leave to bring in a bill to assimilate the county 
 franchise to that existing in boroughs. Lord John Russell opposed the
 
 881. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 285 
 
 motion, and the Government were defeated by 100 votes agaimii o2. It 
 was evident that this was only what is called a ' snap ' vote; that the 
 House was taken by surprise, and that the result in no wise represented 
 the general feeling of Parliament. But still it was a vexatious occurrence 
 for the Ministry, already humiliated by the small majority they had obtained 
 on Disraeli's motion. Their budget had already been received with 
 very general marks of dissatisfaction. The Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 only proposed a partial and qualified repeal of the window tax, an impost 
 vvhich was justly detested, and he continued the income tax. The budget 
 was introduced shortly before Mr. Locke King's motion, and every day 
 that had elapsed since its introduction only more and more developed the 
 public dissatisfaction with which it was regarded. Under all these cir- 
 cumstances Lord John Russell felt that he had no alternative but to tender 
 his resignation to the Queen. Leaving his Ecclesiastical Titles Bill sus- 
 pended in air, he announced that he could no longer think of carrying on 
 the government of the country. 
 
 The. question was, who should succeed him. The Queen sent, for Lord 
 Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby. Lord Stanley offered to do his best to 
 form a Government, but was not at all sanguine about the success of the 
 task nor eager to undertake it. He even recommended that before he 
 made any experiment Lord John Russell should try if he could not do 
 something by getting some of the Peelites, as they were then beginning to 
 be called the followers of Sir Robert Peel who had held with him to the 
 last to join him and thus patch up the Government anew. This was 
 tried, and failed. The Peelites would have nothing to do with the Eccle- 
 siastical Titles Bill, and Lord John Russell would not go on without it. 
 On the other hand, Lord Aberdeen, the chief of the Peelites in the House 
 of Lords, would not attempt to form a Ministry of his own, frankly ac- 
 knowledging that in the existing temper of the country it would be im- 
 possible for any Government to get on without legislating in some way on 
 the Papal aggression. There was nothing for it, but for Lord Stanley to 
 try. lie tried without hope, and of course he was unsuccessful. The 
 position of parties was very peculiar. It was impossible to form any com- 
 bination which could really agree upon anything. There were three parties 
 out of which a Ministry might be formed. These were the Whigs, the 
 Conservatives, and the Peelites. The Peelites were a very rising and 
 promising body of men. Among them were Sir James Graham, Lord 
 Canning, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Cardwell, and some 
 others almost equally well known. Only these three groups were fairly 
 in the competition for office; for the idea of a Ministry of Radicals and 
 Manchester men was not then likely to present itself to any official mind
 
 286 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cii. xx. 
 
 But how could anyone put together a, Ministry formed from a combination 
 of these three? The Peelites would riot coalesce with the Tories because 
 of the Protection question, to which Mr. Disraeli's motion had given a 
 new semblance of vitality, and because of Lord Stanley's own declaration 
 that he still regarded the policy of Free Trade as only an experiment. The 
 Peelites would not combine with the Whigs because of the Ecclesiastical 
 Titles Bill. The Conservatives would not disavow protective ideas ; the 
 Whigs would not give up the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. No statesman, 
 therefore, could form a Government without having to count on two great 
 parties being against him on one question or the other. All manner of 
 delays took place. The Duke of Wellington was consulted. Lord Lans- 
 downe was consulted. The wit of man could suggest nothing satisfactory. 
 The conditions for extracting any satisfactory solution did not exist. There 
 was nothing better to be done than to ask the ministers who had resigned 
 to resume their places and muddle on as they best could. It is net enough 
 to say that there was nothing better to be done : there was nothing else to be 
 done. They were at all events still administering the affairs of the country, 
 and no one would relieve them of the task. Ipso facto they had to stay. 
 
 The ministers returned to their places and resumed the Ecclesiastical 
 Titles Bill. It was then that they made the change in its conditions 
 which has already been mentioned, and thus created new argument 
 against them on both sides of the House of Commons. They struck out 
 of the bill every word that might appear like an encroachment on the 
 Roman Church within the sphere of its own ecclesiastical operations, and 
 made it simply an Act against the public and ostentatious assumption of 
 illegal titles. The bill was wrangled over until the end of June, and 
 then a large number, some seventy, of the Irish Catholic members publicly 
 seceded from the discussion and announced that they would take no further 
 part in the divisions. On this some of the strongest opponents of the 
 Papal aggression, led by Sir Frederick Thesiger, afterwards Lord Chelms- 
 ford, brought in a series of resolutions intended to make the bill more 
 stringent than it had been even as originally introduced. The object of the 
 resolutions was principally to give the power of prosecuting and claiming 
 a penalty to anybody, provided he obtained the consent of the law officers 
 of the Crown, and to make penal the introduction of bulls. The Govern- 
 ment opposed the introduction of these amendments, and were put in the 
 awkward position of having to act as antagonists of the party in the 
 country who represented the strongest hostility to the Papal aggression. 
 Thus for the moment the author of the Durham letter was seemingly con- 
 verted into a champion of the lioman Catholic side of the controversy. His 
 championship was ineffective. The Irish members took no part in the con-
 
 1851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 287 
 
 troversy, .and the Government were beaten by the ultra-Protestant party on 
 every division. Lord John Russell was bitterly taunted by various of hi 
 opponents, and was asked with indignation why he did not withdraw the 
 bill when it ceased to be any longer his own scheme, lie probably 
 thought by this time that it really made very little matter what bill was 
 passed so long as any bill was passed, and that the best thing to do was to 
 get the controversy out of the way by any process. He did not therefore 
 withdraw the bill, although Sir Frederick Thcsiger carried all his stringent 
 clauses. When the measure came on for a third reading, Lord John 
 Russell moved the omission of the added clauses, but he was defeated by 
 large majorities. The bill was done with so far as the House of Commons 
 was concerned. After an eloquent and powerful protest from Mr. Glad- 
 stone against the measure, as one disparaging to the great principle of 
 religious freedom, the bill was read a third time. It went up to the 
 House of Lords, was passed there without alteration although not without 
 opposition, and soon after received the Royal assent. 
 
 This was practically the last the world heard about it. In the Roman 
 Church everything went on as before. The new Cardinal Archbishop still 
 called himself Archbishop of Westminster ; some of the Irish prelate- 
 made a point of ostentatiously using their territorial titles, in letters ad- 
 dressed to the ministers themselves. The bitterness of feeling which the 
 Papal aggression and the legislation against it had called up did not indeed 
 pass away very soon. It broke out again and again, sometimes in the form 
 of very serious riot. It turned away at many an election the eyes 
 and minds of the constituencies from questions of profound and genuine 
 public interest to dogmatic controversy and the hates of jarring sectaries. 
 It furnished political capital for John Sadleir and his band, and kept them 
 nourishing for a while ; and it set up in the Irish popular mind a purely 
 imaginary figure of Lord John Russell, who became regarded as the 
 malign enemy of the Catholic faith and of all religious liberty. But save 
 for the quarrels aroused at the time, the act of the Pope and the Act or 
 Parliament were alike dead letters. Nothing came of the Papal bull. 
 England was not restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic 
 Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London 
 retained their places and their spiritual jurisdiction as before. Cardinal 
 Wiseman remained only a prelate of Roman Catholics. On the other 
 hand, the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was never put in force. Nobody 
 troubled about it. Many years after, in 1871, it was cuietly repealed. It 
 died in such obscurity that the outer public hardly knew whether it was 
 above ground or below. Certainly, if the whole agitation showed that 
 England was thoroughly Protestant, it also showed that English Pro-
 
 288 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xx. 
 
 testants had not much of the persecuting spirit. They had no inclination 
 to molest their Catholic neighbours, and only asked to be let alone. The 
 Pope, they believed, had insulted them ; they resented the insult that 
 was all. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK. 
 
 FIE first of May, 1851, will always be memorable as the day on which 
 the Great Exhibition AVRS opened in Hyde Park. The year 1851, indeed, 
 is generally associated in the memory of Englishmen with that first Great 
 International Exhibition. As we look back upon it pleasant recollections 
 come up of the great glass palace in Hyde Park, the palace ' upspringing 
 from the verdant sod,' which Thackeray described so gracefully and with 
 so much poetic feeling. The strange crowds of the curious of all provinces 
 and all nations are seen again. The marvellous, and at that time wholly 
 unprecedented, collections of the products of all countries ; the glitter of the 
 Koh-i-Noor, the palm trees beneath the glass roof, the leaping fountains, the 
 statuary, the ores, the ingots, the huge blocks of coal, the lacework, the loom- 
 work, the Oriental stuffs all these made on the mind of the ordinary 
 inexpert a confused impression of lavishness and profusion and order and 
 fantastic beauty which was then wholly novel, and could hardly be 
 recalled except in mere memory. The novelty of the experiment was 
 that which made it specially memorable. Many exhibitions of a similar 
 kind have taken place since. Some of these fiir surpassed that of Hyde 
 Park in the splendour and variety of the collections brought, together. 
 Two of them at least those of Paris in 18G7 and 1878 were infinitely 
 superior in the array and display of the products, the dresses, the inhabi- 
 tants of far-divided countries. But the impression which the Hyde Park 
 Exhibition made upon the ordinary mind was like that of the boy's first 
 visit to the play an impression never to be equalled, no matter by what, 
 fc'ir superior charm of spectacle it may in after years again and again be 
 followed. 
 
 Golden indeed were the expectations with which hopeful people wel- 
 comed the Exhibition of 1851. It was the first organised to gather all 
 the representatives of the world's industry into one great fair; and there 
 were those who seriously expected that men who had once been prevailed 
 upon to meet together in friendly and peaceful rivalry would never again 
 be persuaded to meet in rivalry of a fiercer kind. It seems extraordinary 
 now to think that any sane person can have indulged in such expectations.
 
 I8,il. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 289 
 
 or can have imagined that the tremendous forces generated by the rival 
 interests, ambitions, and passions of races could be subdued into har- 
 monious co-operation by the good sense and good feeling born of a friendly 
 meeting. The Hyde Park Exhibition and all the exhibitions that followed 
 it have not as yet made the slightest perceptible difference in the warlike 
 tendencies of nations. The Hyde Park Exhibition was often described as 
 the festival to open the long reign of Peace. It might as a mere matter 
 of chronology be called without any impropriety the festival to celebrate 
 the close of the short reign of Peace. From that year, 1851, it may be said 
 fairly enough that the world has hardly known a week of peace. The 
 coup d'etat in France closed the year. The Crimean War began almost 
 immediately after, and was followed by the Indian Mutiny, and that by 
 the war between France and Austria, the long civil war in the United 
 States, the Neapolitan enterprises of Garibaldi, and the Mexican inter- 
 vention, until we come to the war between Austria, Prussia, and Denmark; 
 the short sharp struggle for German supremacy between Austria and 
 Prussia, the war between France and Germany, and the war between 
 Russia and Turkey. Such were, in brief summary, the events that 
 quickly followed the great inaugurating Festival of Peace in 1851. Of 
 course those who organised the Great Exhibition were in no way respon- 
 sible for the exalted and extravagant expectations which were formed as 
 to its effects on the history of the world and the elements of human 
 nature. But there was a great deal too much of the dithyrambic aboxit 
 the style in which many writers and speakers thought fit to describe the 
 Exhibition. "With some of these all this was the result of genuine 
 enthusiasm. In other instances the extravagance was indulged in by 
 persons not habitually extravagant, but, on the contrary, very sober, 
 methodical, and calculating, who by the very fact of their possessing 
 eminently these qualities were led into a total misconception of the 
 influence of such assemblages of men. These calm and wise persons 
 assumed that because they themselves, if shown that a certain course of 
 conduct was for their material and moral benefit, would instantly follow 
 it and keep to it, it must therefore follow that all peoples and states were 
 :uuenable to the same excellent principle of self-discipline. War is a 
 foolish and improvident, not to say immoral and atrocious, way of trying 
 to adjust our disputes, they argued ; let peoples far divided in geogra- 
 phical situation be only brought together and induced to talk this over, 
 and see how much more profitable and noble is the rivalry of peace in 
 trade and commerce, and they will never think of the coarse and brutal 
 arbitrament of battle any more. Not a few others, it must be owned, 
 indulged in the high-flown glorification of the reign of peace to come 
 VOL, I. F
 
 290 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxi. 
 
 because the Exhibition was the special enterprise of the Prince Consort, 
 and they had a natural aptitude for the production of courtly strains. 
 But among all these classes of paean -singers it did happen that a good deal 
 of unmerited discredit was cast upon the results of the Great Exhibition: 
 for the enterprise was held responsible for illusions it had of itself nothing 
 to do with creating, and disappointments which Avere no consequence of 
 any failure on its part. Even upon trade and production it is very easy 
 to exaggerate the beneficent influences of an international exhibition. 
 But that such enterprises have some beneficial influence is beyond doubt ; 
 and that they are interesting, instructive, well calculated to educate and 
 refine the minds of nations, may be admitted by the least enthusiastic 
 o men. 
 
 The first idea of the Exhibition was conceived by Prince Albert; ami 
 it was his energy and influence which succeeded in carrying the idea into 
 practical execution. Probably no influence less great than that which his 
 station gave to the Prince would have prevailed to carry to success so 
 difficult an enterprise. There had been industrial exhibitions before on a 
 small scale and of local limit ; but if the idea of an exhibition in which 
 all the nations of the world were to compete had occurred to other minds 
 before, as it may well have done, it was merely as a vague thought, a 
 day-dream, without any claim to a practical realisation. Prince Albert 
 was President of the Society of Arts, and this position secured him a 
 platform for the effective promulgation of his ideas. On June 30, 1849, 
 he called a meeting of the Society of Arts at Buckingham Palace. He 
 proposed that the Society should undertake the initiative in the promotion 
 of an exhibition of the works of all nations. The main idea of Prince 
 Albert was that the exhibition should be divided into four great sections 
 the first to contain raw materials and produce ; the second machinery 
 for ordinary industrial and productive purposes and mechanical inventions 
 of the more ingenious kind ; the third manufactured articles ; and the 
 fourth sculpture, models, and the illustrations of the plastic arts generally 
 The idea was at once taken up by the Society of Arts, and by their agency 
 spread abroad. On October 17 in the same year a meeting of merchants 
 and bankers was held in London to promote the success of the under- 
 taking. In the first few days of 1850 a formal Commission was appointed 
 ' for the promotion of the Exhibition of the Works of All Nations, to be 
 holden in the year 1851.' Prince Albert was appointed President of the 
 Commission. The enterprise was now fairly launched. A few days after 
 a meeting was held in the Mansion House to raise; funds in aid of the 
 Exhibition, and ten thousand pounds was at once collected. This of 
 course was but the beginning, and a guarantee fund of two hundred 
 thousand pounds was very soon obtained.
 
 1H50. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 291 
 
 On March 21 in the same your the Lord Mayor of London gave a 
 banquet at the Mansion House to the chief magistrates of the cities, 
 towns, and boroughs of the United Kingdom, for the purpose of inviting 
 their co-operation in support o the undertaking. Prince Albert wa.s 
 present, and spoke. He had cultivated the art of speaking with much 
 success, and had almost entirely overcome whatever difficulty stood in his 
 way from his foreign birth and education. He never quite lost his foreign 
 accent. No man coming to a new country at the age of manhood as 
 Prince Albert did ever acquired the new tongue in such a manner as to 
 lose all trace of a foreign origin ; and to the end of his career Prince 
 Albert spoke with an accent which, however carefully trained, still 
 betrayed its early habitudes. But, except for this slight blemish, Prince 
 Albert may be said to have acquired a perfect mastery of the English 
 language; and lie became a remarkably good public speaker. He had 
 indeed nothing of the orator in his nature. It was but the extravagance 
 of courtliness which called his polished and thoughtful speeches oratory. 
 In the Prince's nature there was neither the passion nor the poetry that 
 are essential to genuine eloquence ; nor were the occasions on which he 
 addressed the English people likely to stimulate a man to eloquence. But 
 his style of speaking was clear, thoughtful, stately, and sometimes even 
 noble. It exactly suited its purpose. It was that of a man who did not 
 set up for an orator ; and who, when he spoke, wished that his ideas 
 rather than his words should impress his hearers. It is very much to be 
 doubted whether the English public would be quite delighted to have a 
 prince who was also a really great orator. Genuine eloquence would 
 probably impress a great many respectable persons as a gift not exactly 
 suited to a prince. There is even still a certain distrust of the artistic in 
 the English mind as of a sort of thing which is very proper in professional 
 writers and painters and speakers, but which would hardly become persons 
 of the highest station. Prince Albert probably spoke just as well as he 
 could have done with successful effect upon his English audiences. At 
 the dinner in the Mansion House he spoke with great clearness and grace 
 of the purposes of the Great Exhibition. It was, he said, to ' give the 
 world a true test, a living picture, of the point of industrial development 
 at which the whole of mankind has arrived, and a new starting-point 
 from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.' 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that the project of the Great 
 Exhibition advanced wholly without opposition. Many persons were 
 disposed to sneer at it ; many were sceptical about its doing any good ; 
 not a few still regarded Prince Albert as a foreigner and a pedant, and 
 were slow to believe that anything really practical was likely to be 
 
 u2
 
 292 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 01. xxi. 
 
 developed under his impulse and protection. A very whimsical sort of 
 opposition was raised in the House of Commons by a once famous 
 eccentric, the late Colonel Sibthorp. Sibthorp was a man who might 
 nave been drawn by Smollett. His grotesque gestures, his overboiling 
 energy, his uncouth appearance, his huge moustache, marked him out as 
 an object of curiosity in any crowd. He was the subject of one of the 
 most amusing pieces of impromptu parody ever thrown off by a public 
 speaker that in which O'Connell travestied Dryden's famous lines about 
 the three poets in three distant ages born, and pictured three colonels in 
 three different counties born, winding up with : ' The force of Nature 
 could no farther go ; to beard the one she shaved the other two.' One of 
 the gallant Sibthorp's especial weaknesses was a distrust and detestation 
 of all foreigners. Foreigners he lumped together as a race of beings 
 whose chief characteristics were Popery and immorality. While three- 
 fourths of the promoters of the Exhibition were dwelling with the 
 strongest emphasis on the benefit it would bring by drawing into London 
 the. representatives ef all nations, Colonel Sibthorp was denouncing this 
 agglomeration of foreigners as the greatest curse that could fall upon 
 England. He regarded foreigners much as Isaac of York, in ' Ivanhoe,' 
 regards the Knight Templars. ' When,' asks Isaac in bitter remonstrance, 
 ' did Templars breathe aught but cruelty to men and dishonour to 
 women ? ' Colonel Sibthorp kept asking some such question with regard 
 to foreigners in general and their expected concourse to the Exhibition. 
 In language somewhat too energetic and broad for our more polite time, 
 he warned the House of Commons and the country of the consequences to 
 English morals which must come of the influx of a crowd of foreigners at 
 a given season. ' Take care,' he exclaimed in the House of Commons, 
 ' of your wives and daughters ; take care, of your property and your 
 lives ! ' He declared that he prayed for some tremendous hailstorm or 
 visitation of lightning to be sent from heaven expressly for the purpose 
 of destroying in advance the building destined for the ill-omened Exhibi- 
 tion. When Free Trade had left nothing else needed to complete the 
 ruin of the nation, the enemy of mankind, he declared, had inspired us 
 with the idea of the Great Exhibition, so that the foreigners who had first 
 robbed us of our trade might now be enabled to rob us of our honour. 
 
 The objections raised to the Exhibition were not by any means con- 
 fined to Colonel Sibthorp or to his kind of argument. After some con- 
 sideration the Royal Commissioners had fixed upon Hyde Park as the best 
 site for the great building, and many energetic and some influential voices 
 were raised in fierce outcry ag.iinst what was called the profanation of the 
 park. It was argued that the public use of Hyde Park wouB be destroyed
 
 \851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 293 
 
 by the Exhibition : that the park would be utterly spoiled; that its beauty 
 could never be restored. A petition was presented by Lord Campbell to 
 the House of Lords against the occupation of any part of Hyde Park with 
 the Exhibition building. Lord Brougham supported the petition with his 
 characteristic impetuosity and vehemence. He denounced the Attorney- 
 General with indignant eloquence because that official had declined to file 
 an application to the Court of Chancery lor an injunction to stay any pro- 
 ceeding with the proposed building in the park. lie denounced the House 
 of Lords itself for what he considered its servile deference to royalty in 
 the matter of the Exhibition and its site. He declared that when he 
 endeavoured to raise the question there he was received in dead silence ; 
 and he asserted that an effort to bring on a discussion in the House of 
 Commons was received with a silence equally profound and servile. Such 
 facts, he shouted, only showed more painfully ' that absolute prostration of 
 the understanding which takes place even in the minds of the bravest when 
 the word prince is mentioned in this country ! ' It is probably true enough 
 that only the influence of a prince could have carried the scheme to suc- 
 cess against the storms of opposition that began to blow at various periods 
 and from different points. Undoubtedly a vast number, probably the 
 great majority, of those who supported the enterprise in the beginning 
 did so simply because it was the project of a prince. Their numbers and 
 their money enabled it to be carried on, and secured it the test of the 
 world's examination and approval. In that sense the very servility which 
 accepts with delight whatever a prince proposes stood the Exhibition in 
 good stead ; a courtier may plead that if English people in general had 
 been more independent and less given to admiration of princes, the excel- 
 lent project devised by Prince Albert would never have had a fair trial. 
 Many times during its progress the Prince himself trembled for the success 
 of his scheme. Many a time he must have felt inclined to renounce it, or 
 at least to regret that he had ever taken it up. 
 
 Absurd as the opposition to the scheme may now seem, it is certain 
 that a great many sensible persons thought the moment singularly inop- 
 portune for the gathering of large crowds, and were satisfied that some 
 inconvenient, if not dangerous, public demonstration must be provoked. 
 The smouldering embers of Chartism, they said, were everywhere under 
 society's feet. The crowds of foreigners whom Colonel Sibthorp so dreaded 
 would, calmer people said, naturally include large numbers of the ' Reds' 
 of all continental nations, who would be only too glad to coalesce with 
 Chartism and discontent of all kinds, for the purpose of disturbing the 
 peace of London. The agitation caused by the Papal aggression was still 
 in full force and flame. By an odd coincidence the first column of the
 
 294 A HISTORY OF 01) R OWN TIMES. CH. xxi 
 
 Exhibition building had been set up in Hyde Park almost at the same 
 moment with the issue of the Papal bull establishing a Koman Catholic 
 hierarchy in England. These conditions looked gloomy for the project. 
 ' The opponents of the Exhibition,' wrote the Prince himself, ' work with 
 might and main to throw all the old women here into a panic and to drive 
 myself crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a 
 thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim 
 the Red Eepublic in England ; the plague is certain to ensue from the 
 confluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the 
 increased price of everything has not already swept away. For all this I am 
 to be responsible, and against all this I have to make efficient provision.' 
 Most of the Continental sovereigns looked coldly on the undertaking. The 
 King of Prussia took such alarm at the thought of the Red Republicans 
 whom the Exhibition would draw together, that at first he positively pro- 
 hibited his brother, then Prince of Prussia, now German Emperor, from 
 attending the opening ceremonial ; and though he afterwards withdrew the 
 prohibition he remained full of doubts and fears as to the personal safety 
 of any royal or princely personage found in Hyde Park on the opening 
 day. The Duke of Cambridge, being appealed to on the subject, acknow- 
 ledged himself also full of apprehensions. The objections to the site con- 
 tinued to grow up to a certain time. ' The Exhibition,' Prince Albert 
 wrote once to Baron Stockmar, his friend and adviser, ' is now attacked 
 furiously by the Times, and the House of Commons is going to drive us 
 out of the Park. There is immense excitement on the subject. If we are 
 driven out of the Park, the work is done for.' At one time, indeed, this 
 result seemed highly probable ; but public opinion gradually underwent 
 a change, and the opposition to the site was defeated in the House of 
 Commons by a large majority. 
 
 Even, however, when the question of the site had been disposed of, 
 there remained immense difficulties in the way. The press was not on 
 the whole very favourable to the project; Punch, in particular, was hardly 
 ever weary of making fun of it. Such a project, while yet only in embryo, 
 undoubtedly furnished many points on which satire could fasten; and 
 nothing short of complete success could save it from falling under a 
 mountain of ridicule. No half success would have rescued it. The ridi- 
 cule was naturally provoked and aggravated to an unspeakable degree by 
 the hyperbolical expectations and preposterous dithyrambics ot some of 
 the well-meaning but unwise and somewhat too obstreperously loyal sup- 
 porters of the enterprise. To add to all this, as the time for the opening 
 drew near, some of the foreign diplomatists in London began to sulk at 
 the whole project. There were small points of objection made about the
 
 1851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 295 
 
 position and functions of foreign ambassadors ut the opening ceremonial, 
 and what the Queen and Prince meant for politeness was in one instance 
 at least near being twisted into cause of offence. Up to the last moment 
 it was not quite certain whether an absurd diplomatic quarrel might not 
 have been part of the inaugural ceremonies of the opening day. 
 
 The Prince did not despair, however, and the project went on. There 
 was a great deal of difficulty in selecting a plan for the building. Huge 
 structures of brickwork, looking like enormous railway sheds, costly and 
 hideous at once, were proposed ; it seemed almost certain that some one 
 of them most be chosen. Happily, a sudden inspiration struck Mr. (after- 
 wards Sir Joseph) Paxton, who was then in charge of the Duke of Devon- 
 shire's superb grounds at Chatsworth. Why not try glass and iron ? he 
 asked himself. Why not build a palace of glass and iron large enough to 
 cover all the intended contents of the Exhibition, and which should be at 
 once light, beautiful, and cheap ? Mr. Paxton sketched out his plan 
 hastily, and the idea was eagerly accepted by the Royal Commissioners. 
 He made many improvements afterwards in his design ; but the palace of 
 glass and iron arose within the specified time on the green turf of Hyde 
 Park. The idea so happily hit upon was serviceable in more ways than 
 one to the success of the Exhibition. It made the building itself as much 
 an object of curiosity and wonder as the collections under its crystal roof. 
 Of the hundreds of thousands who came to the Exhibition a goodly pro- 
 portion were drawn to Hyde Park rather by a wish to see Paxton's palace 
 of glass than all the wonders of industrial and plastic art that it enclosed. 
 Indeed, Lord Palmerston, writing to Lord Normanby on the day after the 
 opening of the Exhibition, said : ' The building itself is far more worth 
 seeing than anything in it, though many of its contents are worthy of 
 admiration.' Perhaps the glass building was like the Exhibition project 
 itself in one respect. It did not bring about the revolution which it was 
 confidently expected to create. Glass and iron have not superseded brick 
 and stone, any more than competitions of peaceful industry have banished 
 arbitrament by war. But the building, like the Exhibition itself, fulfilled 
 admirably its more modest and immediate purpose, and was in that way a 
 complete success. The structure of glass is indeed in every mind insepa- 
 rably associated with the event and the year. 
 
 The Queen herself has written a very interesting account of the success, 
 of the opening day. Her description is interesting as an expression of the 
 feelings of the writer, the sense of profound relief and rapture, as well as 
 for the sake of the picture it gives of the ceremonial itself. The enthusiasm 
 of the wife over the complete success of the project on which her husband 
 had set his heart and staked his name is simple and touching. If the im-
 
 296 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XXi 
 
 portance of the imdertaking and the amount of fame it was to bring to its 
 author may seem a little overdone, not many readers will complain of the 
 womanly and wifely feeling which could not be denied such fervent ex- 
 pression. ' The great event,' wrote the Queen, ' has taken place a com- 
 plete and beautiful triumph a glorious and touching sight, one which I 
 shall ever be proud of for my beloved Albert and my country. . . . The 
 park presented a wonderful spectacle crowds streaming through it, car- 
 riages and troops passing, quite like the Coronation day, and for me the 
 same anxiety no, much greater anxiety, on account of my beloved Albert. 
 
 The day was bright, and all bustle and excitement The Green Park 
 
 and Hyde Park were one densely crowded mass of human beings, in the 
 highest good humour and most enthusiastic. I never saw Hyde Park look 
 as it did as far as the eye could reach. A little rain fell just as we 
 started, but before we came near the Crystal Palace the sun shone and 
 gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of all nations were 
 floating. . . . The glimpse of the transept through the iron gates, the 
 n-aving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and 
 seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensa- 
 tion which I can never forget, and I felt much moved. . . . The sight as 
 we came to the middle was magical so vast, so glorious, so touching- 
 one felt, as so many did whom I have since spoken to, filled with devotion 
 more so than by any service I have ever heard. The tremendous 
 cheers, the joy expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the 
 mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains ; the organ (with two 
 hundred instruments and six hundred voices, which sounded like nothing), 
 and my beloved husband the author of this peace festival, which united 
 the industry of all nations of the earth all this was moving indeed, and 
 it was and is a day to live for ever. God bless my dearest Albert 1 God 
 bless my dearest country, which has shown itself so great to-day ! One 
 felt so grateful to the great God, who seemed to pervade all and to bless 
 all.' 
 
 The success of the opening day was indeed undoubted. There were 
 nearly thirty thousand people gathered together within the building, and 
 nearly three-quarters of a million of persons lined the way between the 
 Exhibition and Buckingham Palace ; and yet no accident whatever 
 occurred, nor had the police any trouble imposed on them by the conduct 
 of anybody in the crowd. ' It was impossible,' wrote Lord Palmerston, 
 ' for the invited guests of a lady's drawing-room to have 1 conducted them- 
 selves with more perfect propriety than did this sea of human beings.' 
 It is needless to say that there were no hoslile demonstrations by Red 
 Republicans or malignant Chartists or infuriated Irish Catholics. The
 
 1861. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TJMKS. 29? 
 
 one thing which especially struck foreign observers, and to which many 
 eloquent pens and tongues bore witness, was the orderly conduct of the 
 people. Nor did the subsequent history of the Exhibition in any way 
 belie the promise of its opening day. It continued to attract delighted 
 crowds to the last, and more than once held within its precincts at one 
 moment nearly a hundred thousand persons, a concourse large enough to 
 have made the population of a respectable Continental capital. In another 
 way the Exhibition proved even more successful than was anticipated. 
 Tli ere had been some difficulty in raising money in the first instance, and 
 it was thought something of a patriotic risk when a few spirited citizens 
 combined to secure the accomplishment of the undertaking by means of 
 a guarantee fund. But the guarantee fund became in the end merely 
 one of the forms and ceremonials of the Exhibition : for the undertaking 
 not only covered its expenses, but left a huge sum of money in the hands 
 of the Royal Commissioners. The Exhibition was closed by Prince 
 Albert on October 15. That at least may be described as the closing 
 day, for it was then that the awards of prizes were made known in pre- 
 sence of the Prince and a large concourse of people. The Exhibition 
 itself had actually been closed to the general public on the eleventh of 
 the month. It has been imitated again and again. It was followed by 
 an exhibition in Dublin ; an exhibition of the paintings and sculptures of 
 all nations in Manchester ; three great exhibitions in Paris ; the Inter- 
 national Exhibition in Kensington in 18G2 the enterprise too of Prince 
 Albert, although not destined to have his presence at its opening ; an 
 exhibition at Vienna, one in Philadelphia, and various others. Where all 
 nations seem to have agreed to pay Prince Albert's enterprise the compli- 
 ment of imitation, it seems superfluous to say that it was a success. 
 Time has so toned down our expectations in regard to these enterprises 
 that no occasion now arises for the feeling of disappointment which was 
 long associated in the minds of once-sanguine persons with the Crystal 
 Palace of Hyde Park. We look on such exhibitions now as useful agencies 
 in the work of indtistrial development, and in promoting the intercourse 
 of peoples, and thus co-operating with various other influences in the 
 general business of civilisation. But the impressions produced by the 
 Hyde Park Exhibition were unique. It was the first thing of the kind; 
 the gathering of peoples it brought together was as new, odd, and interest- 
 ing as the glass building in which the industry of the world was displayed. 
 For the first time in their lives Londoners saw the ordinary aspect of 
 London distinctly modified and changed by the incursion of foreigners 
 who came to take part in or to look at our Exhibition. London seemed 
 to be playing at holiday in a strange carnival port of way during the lime
 
 298 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. at. xxi. 
 
 the Exhibition was open. The Hyde Park enterprise bequeathed nothing 
 very tangible or distinct to the world, except indeed the palace which, 
 built out of its fabric, not its ruins, so gracefully ornaments one of the 
 soft hills of Sydenham. But the memory of the Exhibition itself is very 
 distinct with all who saw it. None of its followers was exactly like it, or 
 could take its place in the recollection of those who were its contemporaries. 
 In a year made memorable by many political events of the greatest im- 
 portance, of disturbed and tempestuous politics abroad and at home, of 
 the deaths of many illustrious men, and the failure of many splendid 
 hopes, the Exhibition in Hyde Park still holds its place in memory not 
 for what it brought or accomplished, but simply for itself, its surround 
 ings, and its house of glass. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 PALMERSTON. 
 
 THE death of Sir Robert Peel had left Lord Paimerston the most pro- 
 minent, if not actually the most influential, among the statesmen of Eng- 
 land. Palmerston's was a strenuous self -asserting character. He loved, 
 whenever he had an opportunity, to make a stroke, as he frequently put 
 it himself, ' off his own bat.' He had given himself up to the study of 
 foreign affairs as no minister of his time had done. He had a peculiar 
 capacity for understanding foreign politics and people as well as foreign 
 languages ; and he had come somewhat to pique himself upon his know- 
 ledge. As Bacon said that he had taken all learning for his province, 
 Paimerston seemed to have made up his mind that he had taken all Euro- 
 pean affairs for his province. His sympathies were markedly liberal. 
 As opinions went then, they might have been considered among statesmen 
 almost revolutionary ; for the Conservative of our day is to the full as 
 liberal as the average Liberal of 1848 and 1850. In all the popular 
 movements going on throughout the Continent Palmerston's sympathies 
 were generally with the peoples and against the government ; while he 
 had, on the other hand, a very strong contempt, which he took no pains 
 to conceal, even for the very best class of the Continental demagogue. It 
 was not, however, in his sympathies that Paimerston differed from most of 
 his colleagues. He was not more liberal even in his views of foreign 
 affairs than Lord John Russell ; he was probably not so consistently and 
 on princij (e a supporter of free and popular institutions. But Lord Pal- 
 merston'H energetic, heedless temperament, his exuberant animal spirits,
 
 1850. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 299 
 
 and his profound confidence in himself and his opinions, made him much 
 more liberal and spontaneous in his expressions of sympathy than a man of 
 Russell's colder nature could well have been. Palrnerston seized a conclu- 
 sion at once, and hardly ever departed from it. He never seemed to care 
 who knew what he thought on any subject. He had a contempt for men 
 of more deliberate temper, and often spoke and wrote as if he thought a 
 man slow in forming an opinion must needs be a dull man, not to say a 
 fool. All opinions not his own he held in good-humoured scorn. In 
 some of his letters we find him writing of men of the most undoubted 
 genius and wisdom, whose views have since stood all the test of time and 
 trial, as if they were mere blockheads for whom no practical man could 
 feel the slightest respect. It would be almost superfluous to say, in de- 
 scribing a man of such a nature, that Lord Palmerston sometimes fancied 
 he saw great wisdom and force of character in men for whom neither 
 then nor since did the world in general show much regard. As with a 
 man, so with a cause. Lord Palmerston was to all appearance capricious 
 in his sympathies. Calmer and more earnest minds were sometimes 
 offended at what seemed a lack of deep-seated principle in his mind and 
 his policy, even when it happened that he and they were in accord as to 
 the course that ought to be pursued. His levity often shocked them ; his 
 blunt, brusque ways of speaking and writing sometimes gave downright 
 offence. 
 
 In his later years Lord Palmerston's manner in Parliament and out of 
 it had greatly mellowed and softened and grown more genial. He 
 retained all the good spirits and the ready, easy, marvellously telling 
 humour : but he had grown more considerate of the feelings of opponents 
 in debate, and he allowed his genuine kindness of heart a freer influence 
 upon his mode of speech. He had grown to prefer on the whole his friend 
 or even his honourable opponent to his joke. They who only remember 
 Palmerston in his very later years in the House of Commons, and who can 
 only recall to memory that bright racy humour which never offended, will 
 perhaps find it hard to imderstand how many enemies he made for himself 
 at an earlier period by the levity and flippancy of his manner. Many 
 grave statesmen thought that the levity and flippancy were far less dan- 
 gerous even when employed in irritating his adversaries in the House of 
 Commons than when exercised in badgering foreign ministers and their 
 governments and sovereigns. Lord Palmerston Avas unsparing in his 
 lectures to foreign States. He was always admonishing them that they 
 ought to lose no time in at once adopting the principles of government 
 which prevailed in England. He not uncommonly put his admonitions in 
 the tone of one who meant to say : ' If you don't take my advice, you wU)
 
 500 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxti. 
 
 be ruined, and your ruin will serve you right for being such fools. 
 While, therefore, he was a Conservative in home politics, and never even 
 professed the slightest personal interest in any projects of political reform 
 in England, he got the credit all over the Continent of being a supporter, 
 promoter, and patron of all manner of revolutionary movements, and a 
 disturber of the relations between subjects and their sovereigns. 
 
 Lord Palmerston was not inconsistent in thus being a Conservative at 
 home and something like a revolutionary abroad. He was quite satisfied 
 with the state of things in England. He was convinced that when a 
 people had got a well-limited suffrage and a respectable House of Com- 
 mons elected by open vote, a House of Lords, and a constitutional 
 Sovereign, they had got all that in a political sense man has to hope for. 
 He was not a far-seeing man, nor a man who much troubled himself about 
 what a certain class of writers and thinkers are fond of calling ' problems 
 of life.' It did not occur to him to think that, as a matter of absolute 
 necessity, the very reforms we enjoy in one day are only putting us into a 
 mental condition to aspire after and see the occasion for further reforms 
 as the days go on. But he clearly saw that most Continental countries 
 were governed on a system which was not only worn out and decaying, 
 but which was the source of great practical and personal evils to their 
 inhabitants. He desired, therefore, for every country a political system 
 like that of Great Britain, and neither for Great Britain nor for any other 
 country did he desire anything more. He was, accordingly, looked upon 
 by Continental ministers as a patron of revolution, and by English Eadicals 
 as the steady enemy of political reform. Both were right from their own 
 point of view. The familiar saying among Continental Conservatives was 
 expressed in the well-known German lines, which affirm that, ' If the 
 devil had a son, he must be surely Palmerston.' On the other hand, the 
 English Iiadical party regarded him as the most formidable enemy they 
 had. Mr. Cobden deliberately declared him to be the worst minister that 
 had ever governed England. At a later period, when Lord Palmerston 
 invited Cobden to take office under him, Cobden referred to what he had 
 said of Palmerston, and gave this as a reason to show the impossibility of 
 his serving such a chief. The good-natured statesman only smiled, and 
 observed that another public man Avho had just joined his Administration 
 had often said things as hard of him in other days. ' Yes,' answered 
 Cobden, quietly, ' but I meant what I said.' 
 
 Palmerston, therefore, had many enemies among European statesmen. 
 It is now certain that the Queen frequently winced under the expressions 
 of ill-feeling which were brought to her cars as affecting England, and, as 
 she supposed, herself, and which she, believed to have been drawn on her
 
 1850. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 301 
 
 by the inconsiderate and impulsive conduct of Palmerston. The Prince 
 Consort, on whose advice the Queen very naturally relied, was a man of 
 singularly calm and earnest nature. He liked to form his opinions delibe- 
 rately and slowly, and disliked expressing any opinion until his mind was 
 wc'.l made up. Lord Palmerston, when Secretary for Foreign Affairs, was 
 much in the habit of writing and answering despatches on the spur of the 
 moment, and without consulting either the Queen or his colleagues. 
 Palmerston complained of the long delays which took place on several 
 occasions when, in matters of urgent importance, he waited to submit 
 despatches to the Queen before sending them off. He was of opinion that 
 during the memorable controversy on the Spanish marriages the interests 
 of England were once in danger of being compromised by the delay thus 
 forced upon him. He contended too that where the general policy of a State 
 was clearly marked out and well known, it would have been idle to insist 
 that a Foreign Secretary capable of performing the duties of his office should 
 wait to submit for the inspection and approval of the Sovereign and his 
 colleagues every scrap of paper he wrote on before it was allowed to leave 
 England. If such precautions were needful, Lord Palmerston contended, 
 it could only be because the person holding the office of Foreign Secre- 
 tary was unlit for his post ; and he ought, therefore to be dismissed, and 
 some better qualified man put in his place. Of course there is some 
 obvious justice in this view of the case. It would perhaps have been un- 
 reasonable to expect that, at a time when the business of the Foreign 
 Oifice had suddenly swelled to unprecedented magnitude, the same rules 
 and formalities could be kept up which had suited slower and less busy 
 days. But the complaint made by the Queen was not that Palmerston 
 iailed to consult her on every detail and to submit every line relating to 
 the organisation of the Foreign Office for her approval before he sent it 
 off. The complaint was clear, and full of matter for very grave considera- 
 tion. The Queen complained that on matters concerning the actual policy 
 of the State, Palmerston was in the habit of acting on his own independent 
 judgment and authority; that she found herself more than once thus 
 pledged to a course of policy which she had not had an opportunity of 
 considering, and would not have approved if she had had such an oppor- 
 tunity ; and that she hardly ever found any question absolutely intact and 
 uucompromised when it was submitted to her judgment. The complaint 
 was justified in many cases. Lord Palmerston frequently acted in a 
 manner which almost made it seem as if he were purposely ignoring the 
 authority of the Sovereign. In part this came from the natural impatience 
 of a quick man confident in his own knowledge of a subject, and chafing 
 at any delay which he thought unnecessary and merely formal. But it is
 
 302 A H1STOEY OF GUI* OWN TIMES. en. AXH. 
 
 not easy to avoid a. suspicion that Lord Palmerston's rapidity of action 
 sometimes had a different explanation. Two impressions seem to have 
 had a place deeply down in the mind of the Foreign Secretary. He 
 appears to have felt sure that, roughly speaking, the sympathies of the 
 English people were with the Continental movements against the sove- 
 reigns, and that the sympathies of the English Court were with the 
 sovereigns against the popular movements. In the first belief he was 
 undoubtedly right. In the second he was probably right. It is not 
 likely that a man of Prince Albert's peculiar turn of mind could have 
 admitted much sympathy with revolution against constituted authority 
 of any kind. Even his Liberalism, undoubtedly a deep and genuine 
 conviction, did not lead him to ma\e much allowance for any dis- 
 turbing impulses. His orderly intellectual nature, with little of fire 
 or passion in it, was prone to estimate everything by the manner in 
 which it stood the test of logical argument. He could understand arguing 
 against a bad system better than he could understand taking the risk of 
 making things worse by resisting it. Some of the published memoranda 
 or other writings of Prince Albert are full of a curious interest as showing 
 the way in which a calm, intellectual and earnest man could approach 
 some of the burning questions of the day with the belief apparently that 
 the great antagonisms of systems and of opposing national forces could be 
 argued into moderation and persuaded into compromise. In Prince Albert 
 there were two tendencies counteracting each other. His natural sym- 
 pathies were manifestly with the authority of thrones. His education taught 
 him that thrones can only exist by virtue of their occupants recognising the 
 fact that they do not exist of their own authority, and taking care that they 
 do not become unsuited to the time. The influence of Prince Albert would 
 therefore be something very different from the impulses and desires of Lord 
 Palmerston. It is hardly to be doubted that Palmerston sometimes acted 
 upon this conviction. He thought he understood better than others not 
 only the tendencies of events in foreign politics, but also the tendencies of 
 English public opinion with regard to them. He well knew that so long 
 as he had public opinion with him, no influence could long prevail against 
 him. His knowledge of English public opinion was something like an 
 instinct. It could always be trusted. It had, indeed, no far reach. Lord 
 Palmerston never could be relied upon for a judgment as to the possible 
 changes of a generation or even a few years. But he was an almost infal- 
 lible guide as to what a majority of the English people were likely to say 
 if asked at the particular moment when any question was under dispute, 
 almerston never really guided, but always followed, the English public, 
 fcvn in foreign affairs, lie was, it seems almost needless to say, an
 
 ISftC. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMK.S. :i<)3 
 
 incomparably better judge of the direction English sentiment was likely 
 to take than the most acute foreigner put in such a place as Prince 
 Albert's could possibly hope to be. It may be assumed, then, that some at 
 least of Lord Palmerston's actions were dictated by the conviction that 
 he had the general force of that sentiment to sustain him in case his mod(r 
 of conducting the business of the Foreign Office should ever be called 
 into account. 
 
 A time came when it was called into account. The Queen and the 
 Prince had long chafed under Lord Palmerston's cavalier way of doing 
 business. So far back as 1849 her Majesty had felt obliged to draw the 
 attention of the Foreign Secretary to the fact that his office was constitu- 
 tionally under the control of the Prime Minister, and that the despatches 
 to be submitted for her approval should, therefore, pass through the hands 
 of Lord John Russell. Lord John Russell approved of this arrangement, 
 only suggesting and the suggestion is of some moment in considering the 
 defence of his conduct afterwards made by Lord Palmerston that every 
 facility should be given for the transaction of business by the Queen's 
 attending to the draft despatches as soon as possible after their arrival. 
 The Queen accepted the suggestion good-humouredly, only pleading that 
 she should ' not be pressed for an answer within a few minutes, as is done 
 now sometimes.' One can see tolerably well what a part of the difficulty 
 was even from these slight hints. Lord Palmerston was rapid in forming 
 his judgments as in all his proceedings, and when once he had made up 
 his mind was impatient of any delay which seemed to him superfluous. 
 Prince Albert was slow, deliberate, reflective, and methodical. Lord 
 Palmerston was always sure he was right in every judgment he formed, 
 even if it were adopted on the spur of the moment ; Prince Albert loved 
 reconsideration, and was open to new argument and late conviction. How- 
 ever, the difficulty was got over in 1849. Lord Palmerston agreed to every 
 suggestion, and for the time all seemed likely to go smoothly. It was only 
 for the time. The Queen soon believed she had reason to complain that the 
 new arrangement was not carried out. Things were going on, she thought, 
 in just the old way. Lord Palmerston dealt as before with foreign courts 
 according to what seemed best to him at the moment ; and his Sovereign 
 and his colleagues often only knew of some important despatch or instruc- 
 tion when the thing was done and could not be conveniently or becom- 
 ingly iindone. The Prince, at her Majesty's request, wrote to Lord John 
 Russell, complaining strongly of the conduct of Lord Palmerston. The 
 letter declared that Lord Palmerston had failed in his duty towards her, 
 ' and not from oversight or negligence, but upon principle, and with 
 astonishing pertinacity, against every effort of the Queen. Besides which,
 
 304 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. xxu. 
 
 Lord Palmerston does not scruple to let it appear in public as if the 
 Sovereign's negligence in attending to the papers sent to her caused delay 
 and annoyance.' Even before this it seems that the Queen had drawn up 
 a memorandum to lay down in clear and severe language the exact rules 
 by which the Foreign Secretary must be bound in his dealings with her. 
 The memorandum was not used at that time, as it was thought that the 
 remonstrances of the Sovereign and the Prime Minister alike could hardly 
 fail to have some effect on the Foreign Secretary. This time, however, 
 the Queen appears to have felt that she could no longer refrain ; and 
 accordingly the following important memorandum was addressed by her 
 Majesty to the Prime Minister. It is well worth quoting in full, partly 
 because it became a subject of much interest and controversy afterwards, 
 and partly because of the tone of peculiar sternness, rare indeed from a 
 sovereign to a minister in our times, in which its instructions are con- 
 veyed. 
 
 ' Osborne, August 12, 1850. 
 
 ' With reference to the conversation about Lord Palmerston which the 
 Queen had with Lord John Russell the other day, and Lord Palmerston's 
 disavowal that he ever intended any disrespect to her by the various 
 neglects of which she has had so long and so often to complain, she thinks 
 it right, in order to prevent any mistake for the future, to explain what it 
 is she expects from the Foreign Secretary. 
 
 ' She requires : 
 
 ' Fir.st. That he will distinctly state what he proposes to do in a given 
 case, in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given 
 her royal sanction. 
 
 ' Second. Having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not 
 arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister ; such an act she must con- 
 sider as failure in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to be visited by 
 the exercise of her constitutional right of dismissing that Minister. She 
 expects to be kept informed of what passes between him and the foreign 
 ministers, before important decisions are taken based upon that inter- 
 course; to receive the foreign despatches in good time, and to have the 
 drafts for her approval sent to her in sufficient time to make herself ac- 
 quainted with their contents before they must be sent off. The Queen 
 thinks it best that Lord John Russell should show this letter to Lord 
 Palmerston.' 
 
 The tone of the memorandum was severe, but there was nothing un- 
 reasonable in its stipulations. On the contrary, it simply prescribed 
 what everyone might have supposed to be the elementary conditions on
 
 (850. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 which the duties of a sovereign and a foreign minister can alone be satis- 
 factorily carried on. Custom as well as obvious convenience demanded 
 such conditions. The Duke of Wellington declared that when he waa 
 Prime Minister no despatch left the Foreign Office without his seeing it. 
 No sovereign, one would think, could consent to the responsibility of rule 
 on any other terms. We have perhaps got into the habit of thinking, or 
 at least of saying, that the sovereign of a constitutional country only rules 
 through the ministers. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that 
 the sovereign has no constitutional functions whatever provided by our 
 system of government, and that the sole duty of a monarch is to make a 
 figure in certain state pageantry. It has sometimes been said that the 
 sovereign in a country like England is only the signet ring of the nation. 
 If this were true, it might be asked with unanswerable force why a verit- 
 able signet ring costing a few pounds, and never requiring to be re- 
 newed, would not serve all purposes quite as well and save expense. But 
 the position of the sovereign is not one of meaningless inactivity. The 
 sovereign has a very distinct and practical office to fulfil in a constitutional 
 country. The monarch in England is the chief magistrate of the State, 
 specially raised above party and passion and change in order to be able to 
 look with a clearer eye to all that concerns the interests of the nation. 
 Our constitutional system grows and develops itself year after year as our 
 requirements and conditions change ; and the position of the sovereign, 
 like everything else, has undergone some modification. It is settled now 
 beyond dispute that the sovereign is not to dismiss ministers, or a minister, 
 simply from personal inclination or conviction, as until a very recent day 
 it was the right and the habit of English monarchs to do. The sovereign 
 now retains, in virtue of usage having almost the force of constitutional 
 law, the ministers of whom the House of Commons approves. But the 
 Crown still has the right, in case of extreme need, of dismissing any 
 minister who actually fails to do his duty. The sovereign is always sup- 
 posed to understand the business of the State, to consider its affairs, and 
 to offer an opinion and enforce it by argument on any question submitted 
 by the ministers. When the ministers find that they cannot allow their 
 judgment to bend to that of the sovereign, then indeed the sovereign gives 
 way or the ministers resign. In all ordinary cases the sovereign gives way. 
 But it was never intended by the English Constitution that the ministers 
 and the country were not to have the benefit of the advice and the judg- 
 ment of a magistrate who is purposely placed above all the excitements 
 and temptations of party, its triumphs and its reverses, and who is assumed 
 therefore to have no other motive than the good of the State in offering 
 tin advice. The sovereign would grossly fail in public duty, aud would 
 VOL, l, x
 
 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxn. 
 
 be practically disappointing the confidence of the nation, who consented to 
 act simply as the puppet of the minister, and to sign mechanically and 
 without question every document he laid on the table. 
 
 In the principles which she laid down therefore, the Queen was strictly 
 right. But the memorandum was none the less a severe and a galling 
 rebuke for the Foreign Secretary. We can imagine with Avhat emotions 
 Lord Palmerston must have received it. He was a proud, self-confident 
 man ; and it came on him just in the moment of his greatest triumph. 
 Never before, never since, did Lord Palmerston win so signal and so 
 splendid a victory as that which he had extorted by the sheer force of his 
 eloquence and his genius from a reluctant House of Commons in the Don 
 Pacifico debate. Never probably in our Parliamentary history did a man 
 of years so advanced accomplish such a feat cf eloquence, argument, and 
 persuasion as he had achieved. He stood up before the world the fore- 
 most English statesman of the day. It is easy to imagine how deeply he 
 must have felt the rebuke conveyed in the memorandum of the Queen. 
 We know as a matter of fact, from what he himself afterwards said, that 
 he did feel it bitterly. But he kept down his feelings. Whether he was 
 right or wrong in the matter of dispute, he undoubtedly showed admirable 
 self-control and good temper in his manner of receiving the reprimand. 
 He wrote a friendly and good-humoured letter to Lord John Russell, 
 saying, ' I have taken a copy of this memorandum of the Queen, and will 
 not fail to attend to the directions which it contains.' The letter then gave 
 a few lines of explanation about the manner in which delays had arisen in 
 the sending of despatches to the Queen, but promising to return to the old 
 practice, and expressing a hope that if the return required an additional 
 clerk or two, the Treasury would be liberal in allowing him that assistance. 
 Nothing could be more easy and pleasant. It might have seemed the ease 
 of absolute carelessness. But it was nothing of the kind. Lord Palmerston 
 had acted deliberately and with a purpose. He afterwards explained why 
 he had not answered the rebuke by resigning his office. ' The paper,' he 
 said, ' was written in anger by a lady as well as by a sovereign, and the 
 difference between a lady and a man could not be forgotten even in the 
 case of the occupant of the throne.' He had 'no reason to suppose that 
 this memorandum would ever be seen by or be known to anybody but the 
 Queen, John Russell, and myself.' Again, ' I had lately been the object 
 of violent political attack, and had gained a great and signal victory in the 
 House of Commons and in public opinion; to have resigned then would 
 have been to have given the fruits of victory to antagonists whom I had 
 defeated, and to have abandoned my political supporters at the very moment 
 when by their means I had triumphe'l.' Rut beyond all that, Lord Palmer-
 
 18/50. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 307 
 
 ton said that by suddenly resigning ' I should have been bringing for 
 decision at the bar of public opinion a personal quarrel between myself 
 and my Sovereign a stop which no subject ought to take if he can possibly 
 *woid it; for the result of such a course must be either fatal to him or in- 
 jurious to the country. If he should prove to be in the wrong, he would 
 be irretrievably condemned; if the Sovereign should bo proved to be m 
 the wrong, the monarchy would suffer.' 
 
 It is impossible not to feel a high respect for the manner in which, 
 having come to this determination, Lord Palmerston at once acted upon 
 it. As he had resolved not to resent the rebuke, he would not allow any 
 gleam of feeling to creep into his letter which could show that he felt any 
 resentment. Few men could have avoided the temptation to throw into a 
 reply on such an occasion something of the tone of the injured, the 
 unappreciated, the martyr, the wronged one who endures much and will 
 not complain. Lord Palmerston felt instinctively the bad taste and 
 unwisdom of such a style of reply. He took his rebuke in the most 
 perfect good humour. His letter must have surprised Lord John Russell. 
 Macaulay observes that Warren Hastings, confident that he knew best and 
 was acting rightly, endured the rebukes of the East India Company with 
 a patience which was sometimes mistaken for the patience of stupidity. 
 It is not unlikely that when the Prime Minister received Lord Palmerston's 
 reply he may have mistaken its patience for the patience of downright 
 levity and indifference. 
 
 Lord Palmerston went a step farther in the way of conciliation. He 
 asked for an interview with Prince Albert, and he explained to the Prince, 
 in the most emphatic and indignant terms, that the accusation against him 
 of being purposely wanting in respect to the Sovereign was absolutely 
 unfounded. ' Had it been deserved, he ought to be no longer tolerated in 
 society.' But he does not seem in the course of the interview to have 
 done much more than argue the point as to the propriety and convenience 
 of the system he had lately been adopting in the business of the Foreign 
 Office. 
 
 So for the hour the matter dropped. Other events interfered ; there 
 were many important questions of domestic policy to be attended to ; and 
 for some time Lord Palmerston's policy and his way of conducting the 
 business of the Foreign Office did not invite any particular attention. 
 But the old question was destined to come up again in more serious form 
 than before. 
 
 The failure of the Hungarian rebellion, through the intervention of 
 Russia, called up a wide and deep feeling of regret and indignation in this 
 country. The English people had very generally sympathised with the
 
 308 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxn. 
 
 cause of the Hungarians and rejoiced in the victories which up to a 
 certain point the arms of the insurgents had won. When the Hungarians 
 were put down at last, not by the strength of Austria but by the inter- 
 vention of Russia, the anger of Englishmen in general found loud-spoken 
 expression. Louis Kossuth, who had been Dictator of Hungary during 
 the greater part of the insurrection, and who represented, in the English 
 mind at least, the cause of Hungary and her national independence, came 
 to England. He was about to take up his residence, as he then intended, 
 in the United States, and on his way thither he visited England. He had 
 applied for permission to pass through French territory, and had been 
 refused the favour. The refusal only gave one additional reason to the 
 English public for welcoming him with especial cordiality. He was 
 accordingly received at Southampton, in Birmingham, in London, with an 
 enthusiasm such as no foreigner except Garibaldi alone has ever drawn in 
 our time from the English people. There was much in Kossuth himself 
 as well as in his cause to attract the enthusiasm of popular assemblages. 
 He had a strikingly handsome face and a stately presence. He was 
 picturesque and perhaps even theatric in his dress and his bearing. He 
 looked like a picture ; all his attitudes and gestures seemed as if they were 
 meant to be reproduced by a painter. He was undoubtedly one of the 
 most eloquent men who ever addressed an English popular audience. In 
 one of his imprisonments Kossuth had studied the English language chiefly 
 from the pages of Shakespeare. He had mastered our tongue as fe\v 
 foreigners have ever been able to do ; but what he had mastered was not 
 the common colloquial English of the streets and the drawing-rooms. The 
 English he spoke was the noblest in its style from which a student could 
 supply his eloquence: Kossuth spoke the English of Shakespeare. He 
 could address a public meeting for an hour or more with a fluency not 
 inferior seemingly to that of Gladstone, with a measured dignity and 
 well-restrained force that were not unworthy of Bright ; and in curiously 
 expressive, stately, powerful, pathetic English which sounded as if it 
 belonged to a higher time and to loftier interests than ours. Viewed as a 
 mere performance the achievement of Kossuth was unique. It may well 
 be imagined what the effect was on a popular audience when such eloquence 
 was poured forth in glowing eulogy of a cause with which they sympa- 
 thised, and in denunciation of enemies and principles they detested. It 
 was impossible not to be impressed by the force of some of the striking 
 and dramatic passages in Kossuth's fervid, half-oriental orations. He 
 stretched out his right hand and declared that ' the time was when I held 
 the destinies of the House of Hapsburg in the hollow of that hand ! ' He 
 apostrophised those who fought and fell in the rank and file of Hungary's
 
 18M. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 309 
 
 champions as 'unnamed demi-gods.' Ho prefaced a denunciation of the 
 Papal policy by an impassioned lament over tlu; brief hopes that tl;e Pope 
 was about to head the Liberal movement in Italy, and reminded his hearers 
 that ' there was a time when the name of Pio Nono, coupled with that of 
 Louis Kossuth, was thundered in vivas along the sunny shores of the 
 Adriatic.' Every appeal was vivid and dramatic; every allusion told. 
 Throughout the whole there ran the thread of one distinct principle of 
 international policy to which Kossuth endeavoured to obtain the assent of 
 the English peqple. This was the principle that if one State intervenes in 
 the domestic affairs of another for the purpose of putting down revolution, 
 it then becomes the right, and may even be the duty, of any third State 
 to throw in the weight of her sword against the unjustifiable intervention. 
 A.S a principle this is nothing more than some of the ablest and most 
 thoughtful Englishmen had advocated before and have advocated since. 
 But in Kossuth's mind and in the understanding of those who heard him, 
 it meant that England ought to declare war against Russia or Austria, or 
 both ; the former for having intervened between the Emperor of Austria 
 and the Hungarians, and the latter for having invited and profited by tht 
 intervention. 
 
 The presence of Kossuth and the reception he got excited a wild anger 
 and alarm among Austrian statesmen. The Austrian minister was all 
 sensitiveness and remonstrance. The relations between this country and 
 Austria seemed to become every day more and more strained. Lord 
 Palmerston regarded the anger and the fears of Austria with a contempt 
 which he took no pains to conceal. Before the Hungarian exile had 
 reached this country, while he was still under the protection of the Sultan 
 of Turkey, and Austria was in wild alarm lest he should be set at liberty 
 and should come to England, Lord Palmerston wrote to a British diplo- 
 matist saying, ' What a childish, silly fear this is of Kossuth ! What 
 great harm could he do to Austria while in France or England ? He 
 would be the hero of half a dozen dinners in England at which would be 
 made speeches not more violent than those which have been made on 
 platforms here within the la^t four months, and he would soon sink into 
 comparative obscurity ; while, on the other hand, so long as he is a State 
 detenu in Turkey he is a martyr and the object of never-ceasing interest.' 
 Lord Palmerston understood thoroughly the temper of his countrymen in 
 general. The English public never had any serious notion of going to 
 war with Austria in obedience to Kossuth's appeal. They sympathised 
 generally with Kossuth's cause, or with the cause which they understood 
 him to represent ; they were taken with his picturesque appearance and 
 his really wonderful eloquence ; they wanted a new hero, and Kossuth
 
 310 A HISTORY OF OTJII OWN TIW.W. CH. xxn. 
 
 geemed positively cut out to supply the want. The enthusiasm cooled 
 down after a while, as was indeed inevitable. The time was not far off 
 when Kossuth was to make vain appeals to almost empty halls, and when 
 the eloquence that once could cram the largest buildings with excited 
 admirers was to call aloud to solitude. There came a time when Kossuth 
 lived in England forgotten and unnoticed ; when his passing away from 
 England was unobserved as his presence there had long been. There 
 seems, one can hardly help saying, something cruel in this way of suddenly 
 taking up the representative of some foreign cause, the spokesman of some 
 ' mission ' ; and then, when he has been filled with vain hopes, letting him 
 drop down to disappointment and neglect. It was not perhaps the fault 
 of the English people if Kossuth mistook, as many another man in like 
 circumstances has done, the meaning of English popular sympathy. The 
 English crowds who applauded Kossuth at first meant nothing more than 
 general sympathy with any hero of Continental revolution, and personal 
 admiration for the eloquence of the man who addressed them. But 
 Kossuth did not thus accept the homage paid to him. No foreigner could 
 have understood it in his place. Lord Palmerston understood it thoroughly, 
 and knew what it meant, and how long it would last. 
 
 The time, however, had not yet come when the justice of Lord Pal- 
 merston's words was to be established. Kossuth was the hero of the hour, 
 the comet of the season. The Austrian statesmen were going on as if 
 every word spoken at a Kossuth meeting were a declaration of war against 
 Austria. Lord Palmerston was disposed to chuckle over the anger thus 
 displayed. ' Kossuth's reception,' he wrote to his brother, ' must have 
 been gall and wormwood to the Austrians and to the absolutists generally.' 
 Some of Lord Palmerston's colleagues, however, became greatly alarmed 
 when it was reported that the Foreign Minister was about to receive a 
 visit from Kossuth in person to thank him for the sympathy and protec- 
 tion which England had accorded to the Hungarian refugees while they 
 were still in Turkey, and without which it is only too likely that they 
 would have been handed over to Austria or Russia. It was thought that 
 for the Foreign Secretary to receive a formal visit of thanks from Kossuth 
 would be regarded by Austria as a recognition by England of the justice 
 of Kossuth's cause and an expression of censiire against Austria. If 
 Kossuth were received by Lord Palmerston, the Austrian ambassador, it 
 was confidently reported, would leave England. Lord John Russell took 
 alarm, and called a meeting of the Cabinet to consider the momentous 
 question. Lord Palmerston reluctantly consented to appease the alarms 
 of his colleagues by promising to avoid an interview with Kossuth. 
 
 It does not seem to us that there was much dignity in the course taken
 
 1851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 311 
 
 by the Cabinet. Lord Palmerston actually used, and very properly used, 
 all the influence England could command to protect the Hungarian refu- 
 gees in Turkey. He had intimated very distinctly, and with the full 
 approval of England, that he would use still stronger measures if necessary 
 to protect at once the Sultan and the refugees. It seems to us that, having 
 done this openly, and compelled Russia and Austria to bend to his urgency, 
 there could be little harm in his receiving a visit from one of the men whom 
 he had thus protected. Austria's sensibilities nrnst have been cf a peculiar 
 nature indeed if they could bear Lord Palmerston's very distinct and ener- 
 getic intervention between her and her intended Tictim, but could not bear 
 to hear that the rescued victim had paid Lord Palmerston a formal visit of 
 gratitude. At all events, it does not seem as if an English ministerwas bound 
 to go greatly out of his way to conciliate such very eccentric and morbid 
 sensibilities. We owe to a foreign State with which we are on friendly 
 terms a strict and honourable neutrality. Our ministers are bound by 
 courtesy, prudence, and good sense not to obtrude any expression of their 
 opinion touching the internal dissensions of a foreign State on the repre- 
 sentatives of that State or the public. But they are not by any means 
 bound to treat the enemies of every foreign State as our enemies. They 
 are not expected to conciliate the friendship of Austria, for example, by 
 declaring that anyone who is disliked by the Emperor of Austria shall 
 never be admitted to speech of them. If Kossuth had come as the pro- 
 fessed representative of an established government, and had sought an 
 official interview with Lord Palmerston in that capacity, then indeed it 
 would have been proper for the English Foreign Secretary to refuse to 
 receive him. Our ministers, with perfect propriety, refused to receive 
 Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, the emissaries of the Southern Confederation, 
 as official representatives o any State. But it is absurd to suppose that 
 when the civil war was over in America an English statesman in office 
 would be bound to decline receiving a visit from Mr. Jefferson Davis. 
 We know, in fact, that the ex-King of Naples, the ex-King of Hanover, 
 Don Carlos, and the royal representatives of various lost causes, are con- 
 stantly received by English ministers and by the Queen of England, and 
 no representatives of any of the established governments would think of 
 offering a remonstrance. If the Emperor of Austria was likely to be 
 offended by Lord Palmerston's receiving a visit from Kossuth, the only 
 course for an English minister, as it seems to us, was to leave him to be 
 offended, and to recover from his anger whenever ho chose to allow com- 
 mon sense to resume possession of his mind. Th<; Queen of England 
 might as well have taken offence at the action of the American Govern- 
 ment, who actually gave, not merely private receptions, but public ap- 
 pointments, to Irish refugees after the outbreak of 1848.
 
 312 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. XXH. 
 
 Lord Palmerston, however, gave way, and did not receive the visit 
 from Kossuth. The hoped-for result, that of sparing the sensibilities oi 
 the Austrian Government, was not attained. In fact, things turned out 
 a great deal worse than they might have done if the interview between 
 Lord Palmerston and Kossuth had been quietly allowed to come off. 
 Meetings were held to express sympathy with Kossuth, and addresses 
 were voted to Lord Palmerston thanking him for the influence he had 
 exerted in preventing the surrender of Kossuth to Austria. Lord Palmer- 
 3ton consented to receive these addresses from the hands of deputations at 
 the Foreign Office. The deputations represented certain metropolitan 
 parishes, and were the exponents of markedly Radical opinions. Some of 
 the addresses contained strong language with reference to the Austrian 
 Government and the Austrian Sovereign. Lord Palmerston observed in 
 his reply that there were expressions contained in the addresses with which 
 he could hardly be expected to concur ; but he spoke in a manner which 
 conveyed the idea that his sympathies generally were with the cause 
 which the deputations had adopted. This was the speech containing a 
 phrase which was identified with Palmerston's name, and held to be 
 specially characteristic of his way of speaking, and indeed of thinking, 
 for many years after, in fact, to the close of his career. The noble 
 lord told the deputation that the past crisis was one which required on the 
 part of the British Government much generalship and judgment ; and 
 that ' a good deal of judicious bottle-holding was obliged to be brought 
 into play.' The phrase, ' bottle-holding,' borrowed from the prize ring, 
 offended a good many persons who thought the past crisis far too grare, 
 and the issues it involved too stern, to be properly described in language 
 of such levity. But the general public were amused and delighted by 
 JIG words, and the judicious bottle-holder became more of a popular 
 favourite than ever. Some of the published reports put this a good deal 
 more strongly than Lord Palmerston did, or at least than he intended to 
 do ; and he always insisted that he said no more to the deputations than 
 he had often said in the House of Commons; and that he had expressly 
 declared he could not concur in some of the expressions contained in the 
 addresses. Still, the whole proceeding considerably alarmed some of 
 Lord Palmerston's colleagues, and was regarded with distinct displeasure 
 by the Queen and Prince Albert. The Queen specially requested that 
 the matter should be brought before a Cabinet Council. Lord John 
 Russell accordingly laid the whole question before his colleagues, and the 
 general opinion seemed to be that Lord Pal -nerston had acted with want 
 of caution. No formal resolution was adopted It was thought that the 
 general expression of opinion from his colleagues and the known displea-
 
 1851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 313 
 
 sure of the Queen would be enough to impress the necessity for greater 
 prudence on the mind of the Foreign Secretary. Lord John Russell, in 
 communicating with her Majesty as to the proceedings of the Cabinet 
 Council, expressed a hope that ' it will have its effect upon Lord Palmerston, 
 to whom Lord John Russell has written urging the necessity of a guarded 
 conduct in the present very critical condition of Europe.' This letter was 
 not written when startling evidence was on its way to show that the irre- 
 pressible Foreign (Secretary had been making a stroke off his own bat 
 again ; and a stroke this time of capital importance in the general game 
 of European politics. The possible indiscretion of Lord Palmerston's 
 dealings with a deputation or two from Finsbury and Islington became a 
 matter of little interest when the country was called upon to consider the 
 propriety of the Foreign Secretary's dealings with the new ruler of a new 
 state system, with the author of the coup d'etat. 
 
 The news of the coitp d'etat took England by surprise. A shock went 
 through the whole country. Never probably was public opinion more 
 xinanimous, for the hour at least, than in condemnation of the stroke of 
 policy ventured on by Louis Napoleon, and the savage manner in which 
 it was carried to success. After a while no doubt a considerable portion 
 of the English public came to look more leniently on what had been done. 
 Many soon grew accustomed to the story of the massacres along the Boule- 
 vards of Paris and lost all sense of their horror. Some disposed of the 
 whole affair after the satisfactory principle so commonly adopted by English 
 people in judging of foreign affairs, and assumed that the system introduced 
 by Louis Napoleon was a very good sort of thing for the French. After 
 a while a certain admiration, not to say adulation, of Louis Napoleon, began 
 to be a kind of faith with many Englishmen, and the coup d'etat was con- 
 doned and even approved by them. But there can be no doubt that when 
 the story first came to be told in England, the almost universal voice of 
 opinion condemned it as strongly as nearly all men of genuine enlighten- 
 ment and feeling condemned it then and since. The Queen was particu- 
 larly anxious that nothing should be said by the British ambassador to 
 commit us to any approval of what had been done. On December 4 the 
 Queen wrote to Lord John Russell from Osborne, expressing her desire 
 that Lord Normanby, our ambassador at Paris, should be instructed to 
 remain entirely passive and say no word that might be misconstrued into 
 approval of the action of the Prince President. The Cabinet met that same 
 day and decided that it was expedient to follow most closely her Majesty's 
 instructions. But they decided also, and very properly, that there was no 
 reason for Lord Normanby suspending his diplomatic functions. Lord 
 N'ormanby had in fact applied for instructions on this point. Next
 
 314 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. e 
 
 day Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Normanby, 
 informing him that he was to make no change in his diplomatic relations 
 with the French Government. Lord Normanby's reply to this despatch 
 created a startling sensation. Our ambassador wrote to say that when he 
 called on the French Minister for Foreign Affairs to inform him that he 
 had been instructed by her Majesty's Government not to make any change 
 in his relations with the French Government, the Minister, M. Turgot, 
 told him that he had heard two days before from Count Walewski, the 
 French Ambassador in London, that Lord Palmerston had expressed to 
 him his entire approval of what Louis Napoleon had done, and his con- 
 viction that the Prince President could not have acted otherwise. It 
 would not be easy to exaggerate the sensation produced among Lord 
 Palmerston's colleagues by this astounding piece of news. The Queen 
 wrote at once to Lord John Russell, asking him if he knew anything about 
 the approval which ' the French Government pretend to have received ' ; 
 declaring that she could not ' believe in the truth of the assertion, as such 
 an approval given by Lord Palmerston would have been in complete con- 
 tradiction to the line of strict neutrality and passiveness which the Queen 
 had expressed her desire to see followed with regard to the late convulsions 
 at Paris.' Lord John Russell replied that he had already written to Lord 
 Palmerston, ' saying that he presumed there was no truth in the report.' 
 The reply of Lord Palmerston was delayed for what Lord John Russell 
 thought an unreasonable length of time at such a crisis ; but when it came 
 it left no doubt that Lord Palmerston had expressed to Count Walewski 
 his approval of the coup d'etat. Lord Palmerston observed indeed that 
 Walewski had probably given to M. Turgot a somewhat highly coloured 
 report of what he had said, and that the report had lost nothing in passing 
 from M. Turgot to Lord Normanby ; but the substance of the letter was a 
 full admission that Lord Palmerston approved of what had been done, and 
 had expressed his approval to Count Walewski. The letters of explana- 
 tion which the Foreign Minister wrote on the subject, whether to Lord 
 Normanby or to Lord John Russell, were elaborate justifications of the 
 coup d'etat ; they were in fact exactly such arguments as a minister of 
 Louis Napoleon might with great propriety address to a foreign Court. 
 They were full of an undisguised and characteristic contempt for anyone 
 who could think otherwise on the subject than as Lord Palmerston thought. 
 In replying to Lord John Russell the contempt was expressed in a quiet 
 sneer ; in the letters to Lord Normanby it was obtrusively and offensively 
 put forward. Lord John Russell in v;iin endeavoured to fasten Palmer- 
 ston's attention on the fact that the question was not whether the action of 
 Louis Napoleon was historically justifiable, but whether the conduct of
 
 1851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 31,5 
 
 the English Foreign Minister in expressing the approval of it without the 
 knowledge and against the judgment of the Queen and his colleagues was 
 politically justifiable. Lord Palmerston simply returned to his defence of 
 Louia Napoleon and his assertion that the Prince President was only anti- 
 cipating the intrigues of the Orleans family and the plans of the Assembly. 
 Lord Palmerston indeed gave a very minute account of a plot among the 
 Orleans princes for a military rising against Louis Napoleon. No evidence 
 of the existence of any such plot has ever been discovered. Louis Napo- 
 leon never pleaded the existence of such a plot in his own justification ; it 
 is now, we believe, universally admitted that Lord Palmerston was for 
 once the victim of a mere canard. But even if there had been an Orlean- 
 ist plot, or twenty Orleanist plots, it never has been part of the duty or 
 the policy of an English Government to express approval of anything and 
 everything that a foreign ruler may do to anticipate or put down a plot 
 against him. The measures may be unjustifiable in their principle or in 
 their severity ; the plot may be of insignificant importance, utterly in- 
 adequate to excuse any extraordinary measures. The English Govern- 
 ment is not in ordinary cases called upon to express any opinion what- 
 ever. It had in this case deliberately decided that all expression of opinion 
 should be scrupulously avoided, lest by any chance the French Government 
 should be led to believe that England approved of what had been done. 
 
 Lord Palmerston endeavoured to draw a distinction between the ex- 
 pressions of a Foreign Secretary in conversation with an ambassador and 
 a formal declaration of opinion. But it is clear that the French ambassa- 
 dor did not understand Lord Palmerston to be merely indulging in the 
 irresponsible gossip of private life, and that Lord Palmerston never said a 
 word to impress him with the belief that their conversation had that 
 colourless and unmeaning character. In any case it was surely a piece oi 
 singular indiscretion on the part of a Foreign Minister to give to the 
 French ambassador, even in private conversation, an unqualified opinion 
 in favour of a stroke of policy of which the British Government as a whole, 
 and indeed with the one exception of Lord Palmerston, entirely disap- 
 proved. To give such an opinion without qualification or explanation 
 was to mislead the French ambassador in the grossest manner and to send 
 him away, as in fact he was sent, under the impression that the conduct 
 of his chief had the approval of the Sovereign and Government of England. 
 Let it be remembered further that the Foreign Secretary who did this hud 
 been again and again rebuked for acting on his own responsibility, for 
 saying and doing things which pledged, or seemed to pledge, the responsi- 
 bility of the Government without any authority, that a formal threat of 
 dismissal actually hung over his head in the event of his repeating sucb
 
 316 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxn. 
 
 indiscretions ; and we shall be oetter able to form some idea of the sensa- 
 tion which was created in England by the revelation of Lord Palmerston' s 
 conduct. Many of his colleagues had cordially sympathised with his views 
 on the occasion of former indiscretions; and even while admitting that he 
 had been indiscreet, yet acknowledged to themselves that their opinion on 
 the broad question involved was not different from his. But even these 
 drew back from any approval of his conduct in regard to the coup d'etat. 
 The almost universal judgment was that he had gone surprisingly wrong. 
 Not a few, finding it impossible to account otherwise for such a proceeding, 
 came to the conclusion that he must have been determined somehow to 
 bring about a rupture with his colleagues of the Cabinet, and had chosen 
 this high-handed assertion of his will as the best means of flinging his 
 defiance in their teeth. 
 
 Lord John Russell made up his mind. He came to the conclusion 
 that he could no longer go on with Lord Palmerston as a colleague in the 
 Foreign Office, and he signified his decision to Lord Palmerston himself. 
 ' While I concur,' thus Lord John Russell wrote, ' in the foreign policy of 
 which you have been the adviser, and much as I admire the energy and 
 ability with which it has been carried into effect, I cannot but observe 
 that misunderstandings perpetually renewed, violations of prudence and 
 decorum too frequently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to 
 have followed from a sound policy and able administration. I am there- 
 fore must reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that the conduct 
 of foreign affairs can no longer be left in your hands with advantage to the 
 country.' Rather unfortunately, Lord John Russell endeavoured to soften 
 the blow by offering, if Lord Palmerston should be willing, to recommend 
 him to the Queen to till the office of Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. This 
 was a proposal which we agree with Mr. Evelyn Ashley, Lord Palmer 
 ston's biographer, in regarding as almost comical in its character. Lord 
 Palmerston's whole soul was in foreign affairs. He had never affected any 
 particular interest in Irish business. He cared little even for the home 
 politics of England ; it was out of the question to suppose that he would 
 consent to bury himself in the Viceregal Court of Dublin and occupy his 
 diplomatic talents in composing disputes for precedence between Protestant 
 deans and Catholic bishops, and in doling out the due proportion of invi- 
 tations to the various ranks of aspiring traders and shopkeepers and their 
 wives. Lord Palmerston declined the offer with open contempt, and in- 
 deed it can hardly be supposed for a moment that Lord John Russell 
 expected he would have seriously entertained it. The quarrel was com- 
 plete ; Lord Palmerston ceased for the time to be Foreign Secretary, and 
 his place was taken by Lord Granville.
 
 1851. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 317 
 
 Seldom has a greater sensation been produced by the removal of a 
 minister. The effect which was created all over Europe was probably 
 just what Lord Palmerston himself would have desired; the belief pre- 
 vailed everywhere that he had been sacrificed to the monarchical and re- 
 actionary influences all over the Continent. The statesmen of Europe 
 were under the impression that Lord Palmerston wa.s put out of office as 
 AH evidence that England was about to withdraw from her former attitude 
 of sympathy with the popular movements of the Continent. Lord 
 Palmerston himself fell under a delusion, which seems marvellous in a 
 man possessed of his clear, strong common sense. He conceived that he 
 had been sacrificed to reactionary intrigue. He wrote to his brother to 
 say that the real ground for his dismissal was a ' weak truckling to the 
 hostile intrigues of the Orleans family, Austria, Russia, Saxony, and 
 Bavaria, and in some degree of the present Prussian Government.' ' All 
 these parties,' he said, ' found their respective views and systems of 
 policy thwarted by the course pursued by the British Government, 
 and they thought that if they could remove the minister they would 
 change the policy. They had for a long time past effectually poisoned 
 the mind of the Queen and Prince against me, and John Eussell giving 
 way rather encouraged than discountenanced the desire of the Queen 
 to remove me from the Foreign Office.' So strongly did the idea prevail 
 that an intrigue of foreign diplomatists had overthrown Palmerston, that 
 the Russian ambassador. Baron Brunnow, took the very ill-advised step 
 of addressing to Lord John Eussell a disclaimer of any participation in 
 such a proceeding. The Queen made a proper comment on the letter of 
 Baron Brunnow by describing it as ' very presuming,' inasmuch as it in- 
 sinuated the possibility ' of changes of governments in this country taking 
 place at the instigation of foreign ministers.' Lord Palmerston was of 
 course entirely mistaken in supposing that any foreign interference had 
 contributed to his removal from the Foreign Office. The only \vonder is 
 how a man so experienced as he could have convinced himself of such a 
 thing ; at least, it would be a wonder if one did not know that the most 
 experienced author or artist can always persuade himself that a disparaging 
 critique is the result of personal and malignant hostility. But that the 
 feeling of the Queen and the Prince had long been against him can hardly 
 admit of dispute. Prince Albert seems not to have taken any pains to 
 conceal his dislike and distrust of Palmerston. Nearly two years before, 
 when the French ambassador was recalled for a time, the Prince wrote to 
 Lord John Russell to say that both the Queen and himself were exceed- 
 ingly sorry to hear of the recall ; adding, ' We are not surprised, however, 
 that Lord Palmerston's mode of doino: business should not be borne bv tl>p
 
 318 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CM. xxu 
 
 susceptible French Government with the same good humour and forbearance 
 as by his colleagues.' At the moment when Lord John Russell resolved on 
 getting rid of Lord Palmerston, Prince Albert wrote to him to say that ' the 
 sudden termination of your difference with Lord Palmerston has taken ua 
 much by surprise, as we were wont to see such differences terminate in his 
 carrying his points, and leaving the defence of them to his colleagues, and 
 the discredit to the Queen.' It is clear from this letter alone that the Court 
 was set against Lord Palmerston at that time. The Court was sometimes 
 right where Palmerston was wrong ; but the fact that he then knew him- 
 self to be in antagonism to the Court is of importance both in judging of 
 his career and in estimating the relative strength of forces in the politics of 
 England. 
 
 Lord Palmerston then was dismissed. The meeting of Parliament 
 took place on the 3rd of February following, 1852. It would be super- 
 fluous to say that the keenest anxiety was felt to know the full reasons of 
 the sudden dismissal. To quote the words used by Mr. Roebuck, ' The 
 most marked person in the Administration, he around whom all the party 
 battles of the Administration had been fought, whose political existence 
 had been made the political existence of the Government itself, the person 
 on Avhose being in office the Government rested their existence as a 
 government, was dismissed ; their right hand was cut off, their moat 
 powerful arm was taken away, and at the critical time when it was most 
 needed.' The House of Commons was not long left to wait for an expla- 
 nation. Lord John Russell made a long speech, in which he went into the 
 whole history of the differences between Lord Palmerston and his col- 
 leagues ; and, what was more surprising to the House, into a history of the 
 late Foreign Secretary's differences with his Sovereign and the threat of 
 dismissal which had so long been hanging over his head. The Prime 
 Minister read to the House the Queen's memorandum which we have 
 already quoted. Lord John Russell's speech was a great success. Lord 
 Palmerston's was, even in the estimation of his closest friends, a failure. 
 Far different, indeed, was the effect it produced from the almost magical 
 influence of that wonderful speech on the ' Don Pncifico ' question, which 
 had compelled even unconvinced opponents to genuine admiration. 
 Palmerston seemed to have practically no defence. He only went over 
 again the points put by him in the correspondence already noticed ; con- 
 tended that on the whole he had judged rightly of the French crisis, and 
 that he could not help forming an opinion on it, and so forth. Of the 
 Queen's memorandum he said nothing. Pie did not even attempt to ox- 
 plain how it carne about that, having received so distinct and severe an 
 injunction, In- had venture" deliberately to disregard it in a matter of the
 
 1852. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 31ft 
 
 greatest national importance. Some of his admirers were of opinion then 
 and long after that the reading of the memorandum must have come on 
 him by surprise ; that Lord John Russell must have sprung a mine upon 
 him; and that Palmerston was taken unfairly and at a disadvantage. 
 But it is certain that Lord John Russell gave notice to his late collcauue 
 of his intention to read the memorandum of the Queen. Besides, Lord 
 Palmerston was one of the most ready and self-possessed speakers that 
 ever addressed the House of Commons. During the very reading of the 
 memorandum he could have found time to arrange his ideas, and to make 
 out some show of a case for himself. The truth, we believe, is that Lord 
 Palmerston deliberately declined to make any reply to that part of Lor..l 
 John Russell's speech which disclosed the letter from the Queen. He 
 made up his mind that a dispute between a sovereign and a subject would 
 be unbecoming of both ; and he passed' over the memorandum in delibe- 
 rate silence. He doubtless felt convinced that, even though such indiscre- 
 tion involved him for the moment in seeming defeat, it would in the long 
 run reckon to his credit and his advantage. Lord Bailing, better known 
 as Sir Henry Bulwer, was present during the debate, and formed an 
 opinion of Palmeraton'a conduct which seems in every way correct and far- 
 seeing. ' I must say,' Lord Balling writes, ' that I never admired him so 
 much as at this crisis. He evidently thought he had been ill-treated ; but 
 I never heard him make an unfair or irritable remark, nor did he seem in 
 anywise stunned by the blow he had received, or dismayed by the isolated 
 position in which he stood. I should say that he seemed to consider that 
 he had a quarrel put upon him which it was his wisest course to close by 
 receiving the fire of his adversary and not returning it. He could not in 
 fact have gained a victory against the Premier on the ground which Lord 
 John Russell had chosen for the combat which would not have been 
 more permanently disadvantageous to him than a defeat. The faults of 
 which he had been accused did not touch his own honour nor that of his 
 country. Let them be admitted and there was an end of the matter. By 
 and by an occasion would probably arise, in which he might choose an ad- 
 vantageous occasion for giving battle, and he was willing to wait calmly 
 for that occasion.' 
 
 Lord Balling judged accurately so far as his judgment went. But 
 while we agree with him in thinking that Lord Palmerston refrained from 
 returning his adversary's fire for the reasons Lord Balling has given, we 
 are strongly of opinion that other reasons too influenced Palmerston. He 
 knew that he was not at that time much liked or trusted by the Queen and 
 Prince Albert. He was not sorry that the fact should be made known to 
 the world. He thoroughly understood English public opinion and was
 
 320 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxn. 
 
 not above taking advantage of its moods and its prejudices. He did not 
 think a statesman would stand any the worse in the general estimation of 
 the English public then because it was known that he was not admired by 
 Prince Albert. 
 
 But the almost universal opinion of the House of Commons and of 
 the clubs was that Lord Palmerston's career was closed. ' Palmerston is 
 smashed !' was the common saying of the clubs. A night or two after 
 the debate Lord Balling met Mr. Disraeli on the staircase of the Russian 
 Embassy, and Disraeli remarked to him that ' there was a Palmerston.' 
 
 Lord Palmerston evidently did not think so. The letters he wrote to 
 friends immediately after his fall show him as jaunty and full of confidence 
 as ever. He was quite satisfied with the way things had gone. He 
 waited calmly for what he called a few days afterwards, ' My tit-for-tat 
 with John Russell,' which came about indeed sooner than even he himself 
 could well have expected. 
 
 We have not hestitated to express our opinion that throughout the 
 whole of this particular dispute Lord Palmerston was in the wrong. He 
 was in the wrong in many, if not most, of the controversies which had 
 preceded it. That is to say, he was wrong in committing England, as he so 
 often did, to measures which had not had the approval of the Sovereign or 
 his colleagues. In the memorable dispute which brought matters to a 
 crisis he seems to us to have been in the wrong not less in what he did 
 than in his manner of doing it. Yet it ought not to have been difficult 
 for a calm observer even at the time to see that Lord Palmerston was 
 likely to have the best of the controversy in the end. The faults of which 
 he was principally accused were not such as the English people would find 
 it very hard to forgive. He was said to be too brusque and high-handed 
 in his dealings with foreign States and ministers ; but it did not seem to 
 the English people in general as if this was an offence for which his own 
 countrymen were bound to condemn him too severely. There was a 
 general impression that his influence was exercised on behalf of popular 
 movements abroad ; and an impression nearly as general that if he 
 had not acted a good deal on his own impulses and of his own authority 
 he could hardly have served any popular cause so well. The coup d'etat 
 certainly was not popular in England. For a long time it was a subject 
 of general reprehension ; but even at that time men who condemned the 
 coup d'etat were not disposed to condemn Lord Palmerston over-much 
 because, acting as usual on a personal impulse, he had in that instance 
 made a mistake. There was even in his error something dashing, showy, 
 and captivating to the general public. He made the influence of England 
 felt, people said. His chief fault was that he was rather too strong for
 
 1862. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 32 1 
 
 those around him. If any grave crisis came, he, it was murmured, ami 
 he alone, would be equal to the occasion and would maintain the dignity 
 of England. Neither in war nor in statesmanship does a man suffer much 
 loss of popularity by occasionally disobeying orders and accomplishing 
 daring feats. Lord Palmerston saw his way clearly at a critical period of 
 his career. He saw that at that time there was, rightly or wrongly, a cer- 
 tain jealousy of the influence of Prince Albert, and he did not hesitate to take 
 advantage of the fact. He bore his temporary disgrace with well-justified 
 composure. ' The devil aids him surely,' says Sussex, apeaking to Raleigh 
 of Leicester in Scott's ' Kenilworth,' ' for all that would sink another ten 
 fathom deep seems but to make him float the more easily.' Some rival 
 may have thought thus of Lord Palmerston. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE ; DEATH OF ' THE DUKE.' 
 
 THE year 1852 was one of profound emotion, and even excitement, in 
 England. An able writer has remarked that the history of the Continent 
 of Europe might be traced through the history of England, if all other 
 sources of information were destroyed, by the influence which every great 
 event in Continental affairs produces on the mood and policy of England. 
 As the astronomer infers the existence and the attributes of some star his 
 keenest glass will not reveal by the perturbations its neighbourhood causes 
 to some body of light within its ken, so the student of English history 
 might well discover commotion on the Continent by the evidence of a 
 corresponding movement in England. All through the year 1852 the 
 national mind of England was disturbed. The country was stirring itself 
 in quite an unusual manner. A military spirit was exhibiting itself 
 everywhere, not unlike that told of in Shakespeare's ' Henry the Fourth.' 
 The England of 1852 seems to threaten that ' ere this year expire we bear 
 our civil swords and native fire as far as France.' At least the civil 
 swords were sharpened in order that the country might be ready for a 
 possible and even an anticipated invasion from France. The Volunteer 
 movement sprang into sudden existence. All over the country corps of 
 young volunteers were being formed. An immense amount of national 
 enthusiasm accompanied and acclaimed the formation of the volunteer 
 army, which received the sanction of the Crown early in the year, and 
 thus became a national institution. 
 
 The meaning of all this movement was explained some years after by 
 
 VOL. I. v
 
 322 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. xxm. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson, in a string of verses which did more honour perhaps to his 
 patriotic feeling than to his poetic genius. The verses are absurdly un- 
 worthy of Tennyson as a poet ; but they express with unmistakable clear- 
 ness the popular sentiment of the hour; the condition of uncertainty, 
 vague alarm, and very general determination to be ready at all events for 
 whatever might come. ' Form, form, riflemen, form,' wrote the Laureate ; 
 ' better a rotten borough or two than a rotten fleet and a town in flames.' 
 ' True that we have a faithful ally, but only the devil knows what he 
 means.' This was the alarm and the explanation. We had a faithful 
 ally, no doubt ; but we certainly did not quite know what he meant. All 
 the earlier part of the year had witnessed the steady progress of the Prince 
 President of France to an imperial throne. The previous year had closed 
 upon his coup d'etat. He had arrested, imprisoned, banished, or shot his 
 principal enemies, and had demanded from the French people a Presidency 
 for ten years, a Ministry responsible to the executive power himself alone 
 and two political Chambers to be elected by universal suffrage. Nearly 
 five hundred prisoners, untried before any tribunal, even that of a drum-head, 
 had been shipped off to Cayenne. The streets of Paris had been soaked 
 in blood. The President instituted a plebiscite, or vote of the whole 
 people, and of course he got all he asked for. There was no arguing with 
 the commander of twenty legions, and of such legions as those that had 
 operated with terrible efficiency on the Boulevards. The first day of the 
 new year saw the religious ceremony at Notre Dame to celebrate the 
 acceptance of the ten years' presidency by Louis Napoleon. The same 
 day a decree was published in the name of the President declaring that 
 the French eagle should be restored to the standards of the army, as a 
 symbol of the regenerated military genius of France. A few days after, 
 the Prince President decreed the confiscation of the property of the Orleans 
 family and restored titles of nobility in France. The birthday of the 
 Emperor Napoleon was declared by decree to be the only national holiday. 
 When the two legislative bodies came to be sworn in, the President made 
 an announcement which certainly did not surprise many persons, but 
 which nevertheless sent a thrill abroad over all parts of Europe. If hostile 
 parties continued to plot against him, the President intimated, and to 
 question the legitimacy of the power he had assumed by virtue of the 
 national vote, then it might be necessary to demand from the people, in 
 the name of the repose of France, ' a new title which will irrevocably fix 
 upon my head the power with which they have invested me.' There 
 could be no further doubt. The Bonapartist Empire was to be restored. 
 A new Napoleon was to come to the throne. 
 
 ' Only the devil knows what he means' indeed. So people were all
 
 1852. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 saying throughout England in 1852. The scheme went on to its develop- 
 ment, and before the year Avas quite out Louis Napoleon was proclaimed 
 Emperor of the French. Men had noticed as a curious, not to sav ominous, 
 coincidence that on the very day when the Duke of Wellington died the 
 Moniteur announced that the French people were receiving the Prince 
 President everywhere as the Emperor-elect and as the elect of God ; and 
 another French journal published an article hinting not obscurely at the 
 invasion and conquest of England as the first great duty of a new Napo- 
 leonic Empire. The Prince President indeed, in one of the provincial 
 speeches which he delivered just before he was proclaimed Emperor, had 
 talked earnestly of peace. In his famous speech to the Chamber of Com- 
 merce of Bordeaux on October 9, he denied that the restored Empire would 
 mean war. ' I say,' he declared, raising his voice and speaking with 
 energy and emphasis, ' the Empire is peace.' But the assurance did not 
 do much to satisfy Europe. Had not the same voice, it was asked, de- 
 claimed with equal energy and earnestness the terms of the oath to the 
 liepublican Constitution? Never, said a bitter enemy of the new Empire, 
 believe the word of a Bonaparte, unless when he promises to kill some- 
 body. Such was indeed the common sentiment of a large number of the 
 English people during the eventful year when the President became 
 Emperor, and Prince Louis Napoleon was Napoleon the Third. 
 
 It would have been impossible that the English people could view al\ 
 this without emotion and alarm. It had been clearly seen how the Prince 
 President had carried his point thus far. He had appealed at every step 
 to the memory of the Napoleonic legend. He had in every possible way 
 revived and reproduced the attributes of the reign of the Great Emperor. 
 His accession to power was strictly a military and a Napoleonic triumph. 
 In ordinary circumstances the English people would not have troubled 
 themselves much about any change in the form of government of a 
 foreign country. They might have felt a strong dislike for the manner 
 in which such a change had been brought about ; but it would have been 
 in nowise a matter of personal concern to them. But they could not see 
 with indifference the rise of a new Napoleon to power on the strength of 
 the old Napoleonic legend. The one special characteristic of the Napo- 
 leonic principle was its hostility to England. The life of the Great Napo- 
 leon in its greatest days had been devoted to the one purpose of humiliating 
 England. His plans had been foiled by England. Whatever hands may 
 have joined in pressing him to the ground, there could be no doubt that 
 he owed his fall principally to England. He died a prisoner of England, 
 and with his hatred of her embittered rather than appeased. It did not 
 aeern unreasonable to believe that the successor who had been enabled to 
 
 T 2
 
 324 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxm 
 
 mount the Imperial throne simply because he bore the name and repre- 
 aented the principles of the First Napoleon would inherit the hatred to 
 England and the designs against England. Everything else that savoured 
 of the Napoleonic era had been revived ; why should this, its principal 
 characteristic, be allowed to lie in the tomb of the First Emperor ? The 
 policy of the First Napoleon had lighted up a fire of hatred between Eng- 
 land and France which at one time seemed inextinguishable. There were 
 many who regarded that international hate as something like that of the 
 hostile brothers in the classic story, the very flames of whose funeral piles 
 refused to mingle in the air; or like that of the rival Scottish families, whose 
 blood, it was said, would never commingle though poured into one dish. 
 It did not seem possible that a new Emperor Napoleon could arise without 
 bringing a restoration of that hatred along with him. 
 
 There were some personal reasons, too, for particular distrust of the 
 upcoming Emperor among the English people. Louis Napoleon had lived 
 many years in England. He was as well known there as any prominent 
 member of the English aristocracy. He went a good deal into very various 
 society, literary, artistic, merely fashionable, purely rowdy, as well as into 
 that political society which might have seemed natural to him. In all 
 circles the same opinion appears to have been formed of him. From 
 the astute Lord Palmerston to the most ignorant of the horse-jockeys 
 and ballet-girls with whom he occasionally consorted, all who met him 
 seemed to think of the Prince in much the same way. It was agreed on 
 all hands that he was a fatuous, dreamy, moony, impracticable, stupid 
 young man. A sort of stolid amiability, not enlightened enough to keep 
 him out of low company and questionable conduct, appeared to be his 
 principal characteristic. He constantly talked of his expected accession 
 somehow and some time to the throne of France, and people only smiled 
 pityingly at him. His attempts at Strasburg and Boulogne had covered 
 him with ridicule and contempt. We cannot remember one authentic 
 account of any Englishman of mark at that time having professed to see 
 any evidence of capacity and strength of mind in Prince Louis Napoleon. 
 
 When the coup d'etat came and was successful, the amazement of the 
 English public was unbounded. Never had any plot been more skilfully 
 and more carefully planned ; more daringly carried out. Here evidently 
 was a master in the art of conspiracy. Here was the combination of steady 
 caution and boundless audacity. What a subtlety of design ; what a per- 
 fection of silent self-control ! How slowly the plan had been matured ; 
 how suddenly it was flashed upon the world and carried to success. Nc 
 haste; no delay; no scruple, no remorse, no fear ! And all this was the 
 work of the dull dawdler of: English drawing-rooms, the heavy, apathetic.
 
 1852. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 325 
 
 unmoral rather than immoral haunter of English race-courses and gambling 
 houses ! What new surprise might not be feared, what subtle and daring 
 enterprise might not reasonably be expected from one who could thus 
 conceal and thus reveal himself, and do both with a like success ! 
 
 Louis Napoleon, said a member of his family, deceived Europe twice : 
 first when he succeeded in passing off as an idiot, and next when he suc- 
 ceeded in passing off as a statesman. The epigram had doubtless a great 
 deal of truth in it. The coup d'etat was probably neither planned nor 
 carried to success by the energy of Louis Napoleon. Cooler and stronger 
 heads and hands are responsible for the execution at least of that enter- 
 prise. The Prince, it is likely, played little more than a passive part in 
 it, and might have lost his nerve more than once but for the greater re- 
 solution of some of his associates, who were determined to crown him for 
 their own sakes as well as for his. But at the time the world at large saw 
 only Louis Napoleon in the whole scheme, conception, execution, and all. 
 The idea was formed of a colossal figure of cunning and daring a Brutus, 
 a Talleyrand, a Philip of Spain, and a Napoleon the First all in one. 
 Those who detested him most admired and feared him not the least. Who 
 can doubt, it was asked, that he will endeavour to make himself the heir 
 of the revenges of Napoleon ? Who can believe any pledges he may give ? 
 How enter into any treaty or bond of any kind with such a man ? Where 
 is the one that can pretend to say he sees through him and understands 
 his schemes ? 
 
 Had Louis Napoleon any intention at any time of invading England ? 
 We are inclined to believe that he never had a regular fixed plan of the 
 kind. But we are also inclined to think that the project entered into his 
 mind with various other ideas and plans more or less vague ; and that 
 circumstances might have developed it into an actual scheme. Louis 
 Napoleon was above all things a man of ideas in the inferior sense of the 
 word ; that is to say, he was always occupying himself with vague, dreamy 
 suggestions of plans that might in this, that, or the other case be advan- 
 tageously pursued. He had come to power probably with the determina- 
 tion to keep it and make himself acceptable to France first of all. After 
 this came doubtless the sincere desire to make France great and powerful 
 and prosperous. At first he had no particular notion of the way to establish 
 himself as a popular ruler, and it is certain that he turned over all manner 
 of plans in his mind for the purpose. Among these must certainly have 
 been one for the invasion of England and the avenging of Waterloo. lie 
 let drop hints at times which showed that he was thinking of something of 
 the kind. He talked of himself as representing a defeat. He was attacked 
 with all the bitterness of a not unnatural but very unrestrained animosity
 
 326 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. L 
 
 in the English press for his conduct in the coup d'etat ; and no doubt he 
 and his companions were greatly exasperated. The mood of a large portion 
 of the French people was distinctly aggressive. Ashamed to some degree 
 of much that had been done and that they had had to suffer, many French- 
 men were in that state of dissatisfaction with themselves which makes 
 people eager to pick a quarrel with someone else. Had Louis Napoleon 
 been inclined, he might doubtless have easily stirred his people to the war 
 mood ; and it is not to be believed that he did not occasionally contem- 
 plate the expediency of doing something of the kind. Assuredly, if he had 
 thought such an enterprise necessary to the stability of his reign, he would 
 have risked even a war with England. But it would not have been tried 
 except as a last resource ; and the need did not arise. No one could have 
 known better the risks of such an attempt. He knew England as his uncle 
 never did ; and if he had not his uncle's energy or military genius, he had 
 far more knowledge of the world and of the relative resources and capa- 
 bilities of nations. He would not have done anything rash without great 
 necessity or the prospect of very certain benefit in the event of success. 
 
 An invasion of England was not, therefore, a likely event. Looking 
 back composedly now on what actually did happen, we may safely say 
 that few things were less likely. But it was not by any means an im- 
 possible event. The more composedly one looks back to it now, the more 
 he will be compelled to admit that it was at least on the cards. The 
 feeling of national uneasiness and alarm was not a mere panic. There 
 were five projects with which public opinion all over Europe specially 
 credited Louis Napoleon when he began his imperial reign. One was a 
 war with Russia. Another was a war with Austria. A third was a war 
 with Prussia. A fourth was the annexation of Belgium. The fifth was 
 the invasion of England. Three of these projects were carried out. The 
 fourth we know was in contemplation. Our combination with France in 
 the first project probably put all serious thought of the fifth out of the 
 head of the French Emperor. He got far more prestige out of an alliance 
 with us than he could ever have got out of any quarrel with us ; and he 
 had little or no risk. We do not count for anything the repeated 
 assurances of Louis Napoleon that he desired above all things to be on 
 friendly terms with England. These assurances were doubtless sincere at 
 the moment when they were made, and under the circumstances of that 
 moment. But altered circumstances might at any time have induced an 
 altered frame of mind. The very same assurances were made again and 
 again to Russia, to Aiistria and to Prussia. The pledge that the Empire 
 was peace was addressed, like the Pope's edict, urli et orbi. 
 
 Therefore we do not look upon the mood of England in 1852 as one
 
 1862. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 327 
 
 of idle and baseless panic. The same feeling broke into life again in 1859. 
 when the Emperor of" the French suddenly announced his determination 
 to go to war with Austria. It was in this latter period indeed that 
 the Volunteer movement became a great national organisation, and that 
 the Laureate did his best to rouse it into activity in the verses of 
 hardly doubtful merit to which we have already referred. But in 
 1852 the beginning of an army of volunteers was made ; and, what is 
 of more importance to the immediate business of our history, the Govern- 
 ment determined to bring in a bill for the reorganisation of the national 
 militia. 
 
 Our militia was not in any case a body to be particularly proud of al 
 that time. It had fallen into decay, and almost into disorganisation 
 Nothing could have been a more proper work for any Government than 
 its restoration to efficiency and respectability. Nothing, too, could have 
 been more timely than a measure to make it efficient in view of the 
 altered condition of European affairs and the increased danger of dis- 
 turbance at home and abroad. We had on our hands at the time, too, one oi 
 our little wars a Caffre war, which was protracted to a vexatious length, and 
 which was not without serious military difficulty. It began in the December 
 of 1850, and was not completely disposed of before the early part of 1853. 
 We could not, therefore, afford to have our defences in any defective con- 
 dition, and no labour was more fairly incumbent on a Government than 
 the task of making them adequate to their purpose. But it was an unfor- 
 tunate characteristic of Lord John Eussell's Government that it attempted 
 so much legislation, not because some particular scheme commended itself 
 to the mature wisdom of the Ministry, but because something had to be 
 done in a hurry to satisfy public opinion ; and the Government could not 
 think of anything better at the moment than the first scheme that came to 
 hand. Lord John Russell accordingly introduced a Militia Bill, which 
 was in the highest degree inadequate and unsatisfactory. The principal 
 peculiarity of it was that it proposed to substitute a local militia for the 
 regular force that had been in existence. Lord Palmerston saw great 
 objections to this alteration, and urged them with much briskness and 
 skill on the night when Lord John Russell explained his measure. When 
 Palmerston began his speech, he probably intended to be merely critical 
 as regarded points in the measure which were susceptible of amendment ; 
 but as he went on he found more and more that he had the House with 
 him. Every objection he made, every criticism he urged, almost every 
 sentence he spoke drew down increasing cheers. Lord Palmerston saw 
 that the House was not only thoroughly with him on this ground, but 
 throughly against the Government on various grounds. A few night?
 
 328 A HISTCm OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxni, 
 
 after he followed up his first success by proposing a resolution to substi- 
 tute the word ' regular ' for the word ' local ' in the bill ; thus, in fact, to 
 reconstruct the bill on an entirely different principle from that adopted by 
 its framer. The effort was successful. The Peelites went with Palmer- 
 ston ; the Protectionists followed him as well ; and the result was that 
 136 votes were given for the amendment, and only 125 against it. The 
 Government were defeated by a majority of eleven. Lord John Russell 
 instantly announced that he could no longer continue in office, as he did 
 not possess the confidence of the country. 
 
 The announcement took the House by surprise. Lord Palmerston had 
 not himself expected any such result from his resolution. There was no 
 reason why the Government should not have amended their bill on the 
 basis of the resolution passed by the House. The country wanted a 
 scheme of efficient defence, and the Government were only called upon to 
 make their scheme efficient. But Lord John Russell was well aware that 
 his Administration had been losing its authority little by little. Since the 
 time when it had returned to power, simply because no one could form a 
 Ministry any stronger than itself, it had been only a Government on 
 sufferance. Ministers who assume office in that stopgap way seldom 
 retain it long in England. The Gladstone Government illustrated this 
 fact in 1873, when they consented to return to office because Mr. Disraeli 
 was not then in a condition to come in, and were dismissed by an over- 
 whelming majority at the elections in the following spring. Lord Pal- 
 merston assigned one special reason for Lord John Russell's promptness 
 in resigning on the change in the Militia Bill. The great motive for the 
 step was, according to Palmerston, ' the fear of being defeated on the vote 
 of censure about the Cape affairs, which was to have been moved to-day ; 
 as it is, the late Government have gone out on a question which they have 
 treated as a motion, merely asserting that they had lost the confidence of 
 the House ; whereas, if they had gone out on a defeat upon the motion 
 about the Cape, they would have carried with them the direct censure of 
 the House of Commons.' The letter from Lord Palmerston to his brother, 
 from which these words are quoted, begins with a remarkable sentence : 
 ' I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell, and I turned him out on 
 Friday last.' Palmerston did not expect any such result, he declared ; 
 but the revenge was doubtless sweet for all that. This was in February 
 1852 ; and it was only in the December of the previous year that Lord 
 Palmerston was compelled to leave the Foreign Offico by Lord John 
 Russell. The same influence, oddly enough, was the indirect cause of 
 both events. Lord Palmerston lost his place because of his recognition of 
 Louis Napoleon ; Lord John Russell fell from power while endeavouring
 
 1852. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES 129 
 
 to introduce a measure suggested by Louis Napoleon's successful usurpa- 
 tion. It will be seen in a future chapter how the influence of Louis 
 Napoleon was once again fatal to each statesman in turn. 
 
 The Russell Ministry had done little and initiated less. It had carried 
 on Peel's system by throwing open the markets to foreign as well as 
 colonial sugar, and by the repeal of the Navigation Laws enabled mer- 
 chants to employ foreign ships and seamen in the conveyance of their 
 goods. It had made a mild and ineffectual effort at a Reform Bill, and 
 had feebly favoured attempts to admit Jews to Parliament. It sank 
 from power with an unexpected collapse in which the nation felt small 
 concern. 
 
 Lord Palmerston did not come to power again at that moment. He 
 might have gone in with Lord Derby if he had been so inclined. But 
 Lord Derby, who, it may be said, had succeeded to that title on the 
 death of his father in the preceding year, still talked of testing the policy 
 of Free Trade at a general election, and of course Palmerston was not dis- 
 posed to have anything to do with such a proposition. Nor had Pal- 
 merston in any case much inclination to serve under Derby, of whose 
 political intelligence he thought poorly, and whom he regarded principally 
 as what he called a ' a flashy speaker.' Lord Derby tried various com- 
 binations in vain, and at last had to experiment with a Cabinet of un- 
 diluted Protectionists. He had to take office, not because he wanted it, 
 or because anyone in particular wanted him ; but simply and solely 
 because there was no one else who could undertake the task. He formed 
 a Cabinet to carry on the business of the country for the moment and 
 until it should be convenient to have a general election, when he fondly 
 hoped that by some inexplicable process a Protectionist reaction would be 
 brought about, and he should find himself at the head of a strong ad- 
 ministration. 
 
 The Ministry which Lord Derby was able to form was not a strong 
 one. Lord Palmerston described it as containing two men of mark, 
 Derby and Disraeli, and a number of ciphers. It had not, except for 
 these two, a single man of any political ability, and had hardly one of any 
 political experience. It had an able lawyer for Lord Chancellor, Lord 
 St. Leonards, but he was nothing of a politician. The rest of the members 
 of the Government were respectable country gentlemen. One of them, 
 Mr. Herries, had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in a short-lived 
 Government, that of Lord Goderich, in 1827 ; and he had held the office 
 of Secretary of War for a few months some time later. He was forgotten 
 by the existing generation of politicians, and the general public only knew 
 that he was still living when they heard of his accession to Lord Derby's
 
 330 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxm. 
 
 Government. The Earl of Malmesbury, Sir John Pakingtou, Mr. Wai- 
 pole, Mr. Henley, and the rest, were men whose antecedents scarcely gave 
 them warrant for any higher claim in public life than the position of 
 chairman of quarter sessions ; nor did their subsequent career in office 
 contribute much to establish a loftier estimate of their capacity. The 
 head of the Government was remarkable for his dashing blunders as a 
 politician, quite as much as for his dashing eloquence. His new lieutenant, 
 Mr. Disraeli, had in former days christened him very happily, ' the Rupert 
 of Debate,' after that fiery and gallant prince whose blunders generally lost 
 the battles which his headlong courage had nearly won. 
 
 Concerning Mr. Disraeli himself it is not too much to say that many of 
 his own party were rather more afraid of his genius than of the dullness 
 of any of his colleagues. It is not a pleasant task in the best of circum- 
 stances to be at the head of a tolerated Ministry in the House of Commons : 
 a Ministry which is in a minority and only holds its place because there 
 is no one ready -to relieve it of the responsibility of office. Mr. Disraeli 
 himself, at a much later date, gave the House of Commons an amusing 
 picture of the trials and humiliations which await the leader of such a 
 forlorn hope. He had now to assume that position without any previous 
 experience of office. Rarely indeed is the leadership of the House of 
 Commons undertaken by anyone who has not previously held office ; and 
 Mr. Disraeli entered upon leadership and office at the same moment for 
 the first time. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the 
 House of Commons. Among the many gifts with which he was accredited 
 by fame, not a single admirer had hitherto dreamed of including a capacity 
 for the mastery of figures. In addition to all the ordinary difficulties of 
 the Ministry of a minority there was, in this instance, the difficulty arising 
 from the obscurity and inexperience of nearly all its members. Facetious 
 persons dubbed the new administration the ' Who ? Who ? Ministry.' The 
 explanation of this odd nickname was found in a story then in circulation 
 about the Duke of Wellington. The Duke, it was said, was anxious to 
 hear from Lord Derby at the earliest moment all about the composition of 
 his Cabinet. He was overheard asking the new Prime Minister in the 
 House of Lords the names of his intended colleagues. The Duke was 
 rather deaf, and, like most deaf persons, spoke in very loud tones, and of 
 course had to be answered in tones also rather elevated. That which was 
 meant for a whispered conversation became audible to the whole House. 
 As Lord Derby mentioned each name, the Duke asked in wonder and 
 eagerness, ' Who ? Who ?' After each new name came the same enquiry. 
 The Duke of Wellington had clearly never heard of most of the new 
 Ministers before. The story went about ; and Lord Derby's Administra- 
 tion was familiarly known as the ' Who ? Who? Government.'
 
 1862. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 331 
 
 Lord Derby entered office with the avowed intention of testing the 
 Protection question all over again. But he was no sooner in office than 
 he found that the bare suggestion had immensely increased his difficulties. 
 The formidable organisation which had worked the Free Trade cause so suc- 
 cessfully seemed likely to come into political life again with all its old vigour. 
 The Free Traders began to stand together again the moment Lord Derby 
 gave his unlucky hint. Every week that passed over his head did some- 
 thing to show him the mistake he had made when he hampered himself 
 with any such undertaking as the revival of the Protection question. 
 Some of his colleagues had been unhappily and blunderingly outspoken in 
 their addresses to their constituents seeking for re-election, and had talked 
 as if the restoration of Protection itself were the grand object of Lord 
 Derby's taking office. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer had been 
 far more cautious. He only talked vaguely of ' those remedial measures 
 which great productive interests, suffering from unequal taxation, have a 
 right to expect from a just Government.' In truth, Mr. Disraeli was well 
 convinced at this time of the hopelessness of any agitation for the restor- 
 ation of Protection, and would have been only too glad of any oppor- 
 tunity for a complete and at the same time a safe disavowal of any 
 sympathy with such a project. The Government found their path 
 bristling with troubles, created for them by their own mistake in giving 
 any hint about the demand for a new trial of the Free Trade question. 
 Any chance they might otherwise have had of making effective head 
 against their very trying difficulties was completely cut away from 
 them. 
 
 The Free Trade League was reorganised. A conference of Liberal 
 members of the House of Commons was held at the residence of 
 Lord John Russell in Chesham Place, at which it was resolved to extract 
 or extort from the Government a full avowal of their policy with regard to 
 Protection and Free Trade. The feat would have been rather difficult of 
 accomplishment, seeing that the Government had absolutely no policy to 
 offer on the subject, and were only hoping to be able to consult the 
 country as one might consult an oracle. The Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 when he made his financial statement accepted the increased prosperity of 
 the few years preceding with an unction which showed that he at least had 
 no particular notion of attempting to reverse the policy which had so 
 greatly contributed to its progress. Mr. Disraeli pleased the Peclites and 
 the Liberals much more by his statement than he pleased hir. chief or 
 many of his followers. His speech indeed was very clever. A m:w 
 financial scheme he could not produce, for he had not had time to make 
 anything like a complete examination <> the finances of the country ; but
 
 832 A HISTORY OF OCJK OWN TIMES. CM. jam. 
 
 he played very prettily and skilfully with the facts and figures, and con 
 veyed to the listeners the idea of a man who could do wonderful things in 
 finance if he only had a little time and were in the humour. Everyone 
 outside the limits of the extreme and unconverted Protectionists was 
 pleased with the success of his speech. People were glad that one whc 
 had proved himself so clever with many things should have shown himself 
 equal to the uncongenial and unwonted task of dealing with dry facts and 
 figures. The House felt that he was placed in a very trying position, 
 and was well pleased to see him hold his own so successfully in it. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli merely proposed in his financial statement to leave things 
 as he found them ; to continue the income-tax for another year, as a pro- 
 visional arrangement pending that complete re-examination of the financial 
 affairs of the country to which he intimated that he found himself quite 
 equal at the proper time. No one could suggest any better course ; and 
 the new Chancellor came off on the whole with flying colours. His very 
 difficulties had been a source of advantage to him. He was not expected 
 to produce a financial scheme at such short notice ; and if he was not equal 
 to a financier's task, it did not so appear on this first occasion of trial. 
 The Government on the whole did not do badly during this period of their 
 probation. They introduced and carried a Militia Bill, for which they 
 obtained the cordial support of Lord Palmerston ; and they gave a Consti- 
 tution to New Zealand ; and then, in the beginning of July, the Parlia- 
 ment was prorogued and the dissolution took place. The elections were 
 signalised by very serious riots in many parts of the country. In Ireland 
 particularly party passions ran high. The landlords and the police were 
 on one side ; the priests and the popular party on the other ; and in several 
 places there was some bloodshed. It was not in Ireland, however, a ques- 
 tion about Free Trade or Protection. The great mass of the Irish people 
 knew nothing about Mr. Disraeli probably had never heard his name, 
 and did not care who led the House of Commons. The question which 
 agitated the Irish constituences was that of Tenant Eight, in the first in- 
 stance ; and the time had not yet arrived when a great Minister from 
 either party was prepared to listen to their demands on this subject. 
 There was also much bitterness of feeling remaining from the discussion? 
 on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. But it may be safely said that not one of 
 the questions that stirred up public feeling in England had the slightest 
 popular interest in Ireland, and the question which the Irish people con- 
 sidered essential to their very existence did not enter for one moment into 
 the .struggles that were going on all over England. 
 
 The speeches of ministers in England showed the same lively diversity 
 as before on the subject of Protection. Mr. Disraeli not only threw
 
 1852. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 833 
 
 Protection overboard, but boldly declared that no one cotdd have supposed 
 the Ministry had the slightest intention of proposing to bring back the 
 laws that were repealed in 1846. In fact the time, he declared, had gone 
 by when such exploded politics could even interest the people of this 
 country. On the other hand, several of Mr. Disraeli's colleagues evi- 
 dently spoke in the fullness of their simple faith that Lord Derby was 
 bent on setting up again the once beloved and not yet forgotten protective 
 system. But from the time of the elections nothing more was heard about 
 Protection or about the possibility of getting a new trial for its principles. 
 The elections did little or nothing for the Government. The dreams of a 
 strengthened party at their back were gone. They gained a little, just 
 enough to make it unlikely that anyone would move a vote of want of 
 confidence at the very outset of their reappearance before Parliament, but 
 not nearly enough to give them a chance of carrying any measure which 
 could really propitiate the Conservative party throughout the country. 
 They were still to be the Ministry of a minority ; a Ministry on sufferance. 
 They were a Ministry on sufferance when they appealed to the country, 
 but they were able to say then that when their cause had been heard the 
 country would declare for them. They now came back to be a Ministry 
 on sufferance, who had made the appeal and had seen it rejected. It was 
 plain to everyone that their existence as a Ministry was only a question of 
 days. Speculation was already busy as to their successors; and it was 
 evident that a new Government could only be formed by some sort of 
 coalition between the Whigs and the Peelites. 
 
 Among the noteworthy events of the general elections was the return 
 of Macaulay to the House of Commons. Edinburgh elected him in a 
 manner particularly complimentary to him and honourable to herself. He 
 was elected without his solicitation, without his putting himself forward as 
 a candidate, without his making any profession of faith or doing any of 
 the things that the most independent candidate was then expected to do ; 
 and in fact, in spite of his positive declaration that he would do nothing 
 to court election. He had for some years been absent from Parliament. 
 Some difference had arisen between him and certain of his constituents on 
 the subject of the Maynooth grant. Complaints too had been made by 
 Edinburgh constituents of Macaulay's lack of attention to local interests, 
 and of the intellectual scorn which as they believed he exhibited in his 
 intercourse with many of those who had supported him. The result of 
 this was that at the general election of 1847 Macaulay was left third or. 
 the poll at Edinburgh. He felt this deeply. He might have easily found 
 some other constituency ; but his wounded pride hastened a resolution he 
 had for some time been forming to retire to a life of private literary
 
 334 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxni. 
 
 labour. He therefore remained out of Parliament. In 1852 the move- 
 ment of Edinburgh towards him was entirely spontaneous. Edinburgh 
 was anxious to atone for the error of which she had been guilty. Macaulay 
 would go no farther than to say that if Edintmrgh spontaneously elected 
 him lie should deem it a very high honour ; and ' should not feel myself 
 justified in refusing to accept a public trust offered to me in a manner so 
 honourable and so peculiar.' But he would not do anything whatever to 
 court favour. He did not want to be elected to Parliament, he said ; he 
 was very happy in his retirement. Edinburgh elected him on those terms. 
 He was not long allowed by his health to serve her ; but so long as he 
 remained in the House of Commons it was as member for Edinburgh. 
 
 On September 14, 1852, the Duke of Wellington died. His end was 
 singularly peaceful. He fell quietly asleep about a quarter-past three in 
 the afternoon in Walmer Castle, and he did not wake any more. He was 
 a very old man in his eighty- fourth year and his death had naturally 
 been looked for as an event certain to come soon. Yet when it did come 
 thus naturally and peacefully, it created a profound public emotion. No 
 other man in our time ever held the position in England which the Duke 
 of Wellington had occupied for more than a whole generation. The place 
 he had won for himself was absolutely unique. His great deeds belonged 
 to a past time. He was hardly anything of a statesman ; he knew little 
 and cared less about what may be called statecraft ; and as an admini- 
 strator he had made many mistakes. But the trust which the nation had 
 in him as a counsellor was absolutely unlimited. It never entered into 
 the mind of any one to suppose that the Duke of Wellington was actuated 
 in any step he took, or advice he gave, by any feeling but a desire for the 
 good of the State. His loyalty to the Sovereign had something antique 
 and touching in it. There was a blending of personal affection with the 
 devotion of a state servant which lent a certain romantic dignity to the 
 demeanour and character of one who otherwise had but little of the 
 poetical or the sentimental in his nature. In the business of politics he 
 had but one prevailing anxiety, and that was that the Queen's Govern- 
 ment should be satisfactorily carried on. Pie gave up again and again his 
 own most cherished convictions, most ingrained prejudices, in order that 
 he might not stand in the way of the Queen's Government and the proper 
 carrying of it on. This simple fidelity, sometimes rather whimsically dis- 
 played, stood him often in stead of an exalted statesmanship, and enabled 
 him to extricate the Government and the nation from difficulties in which 
 a political insight far more keen than his might have failed to prove a 
 guide. 
 
 It was for this true and tried, this simple and unswerving devotion
 
 1862. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 335 
 
 to the national good that the people of England admired and revered him. 
 He had not what would be called a lovcable temperament, and yet the 
 
 nation loved him. He was cold and brusque in manner, and seemed 
 in general to have hardly a gleam of the emotional in him. This was not 
 because he lacked affections. On the contrary, his affections and his 
 friendships were warm and enduring ; and even in public he had more 
 than once given way to outbursts of emotion such as a stranger would 
 never have expected from one of that cold and rigid demeanour. When 
 Sir Robert Peel died, Wellington spoke of him in the House of Lords 
 with the tears which he did not even try to control running down his 
 cheeks. But in his ordinary bearing there was little of the manner that 
 makes a man a popular idol. He was not brilliant or dashing, or emotional 
 or graceful. He was dry, cold, self-contained. Yet the people loved him 
 and trusted in him ; loved him perhaps especially because they so trusted 
 in him. No face and figure were better known at one time to the popu- 
 lation of London than those of the Duke of Wellington. Of late his form 
 
 - had grown stooped, and he bent over his horse as he rode in the Park or 
 down Whitehall like one who could hardly keep himself in the saddle. 
 Yet he mounted his horse to the last, and, indeed, could keep in the saddle 
 after he had ceased to be able to sit erect in an arm-chair. He sometimes 
 rode in a curious little cab of his own devising ; but his favourite way of 
 going about London was on the back of his horse. He was called, par 
 excellence, t the Duke.' The London working man who looked up as he 
 went to or from his work and caught a sight of the bowed figure on the 
 horse, took off his hat and told some passer-by, ' There goes the Duke ! ' 
 His victories belonged to the past. They were but traditions even to 
 middle-aged men in ' the Duke's ' later years. But he was regarded still 
 as an embodiment of the national heroism and success ; a modern St. 
 George in a tightly-buttoned frock-coat and white trowsers. 
 
 Wellington belonged so much to the past at the time of his death that 
 it seems hardly in place here to say anything about his character as a 
 soldier. But it may be remarked that his success was due in great measure 
 to a sort of inspired common sense which rose to something like genius. 
 He had in the highest conceivable degree the art of winning victories. In 
 war, as in statesmanship, he had one characteristic which is said to have 
 been the special gift of Julius Cassar, and for the lack of which Csesar's 
 greatest modern rival in the art of conquest, the first Napoleon, lost all, or 
 nearly all, that he had won. Wellington not only understood what oould 
 be done, but also what could not be done. The wild schemes of almosi 
 universal rule which set Napoleon astray and led him to his destruction 
 would have appeared to the strong common sense of the Duke of Welling.
 
 336 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. or. xxtu. 
 
 ton as impossible and absurd as they would have looked to the lofty 
 intelligence of Caesar. It can hardly be questioned that in original genius 
 Napoleon far surpassed the Duke of Wellington. But Wellington always 
 knew exactly what he could do, and Napoleon often confounded his 
 ambitions with his capacities. Wellington provided for everything, looked 
 after everything ; never trusted to his star or to ohance or to anything but 
 care and preparation and the proper application of means to ends. Under 
 almost any conceivable conditions, Wellington, pitted against Napoleon, 
 was the man to win in the end. The very genius of Napoleon would 
 sooner or later have left him open to the unsleeping watchfulness, the 
 almost infallible judgment of Wellington. 
 
 He was as fortunate as he was deserving. No man could have drunk 
 more deeply of the cup of fame and fortune than Wellington ; and he was 
 never for one moment intoxicated by it. After all his long wars and his 
 splendid victories he had some thirty- seven years of peace and glory to 
 enjoy. He held the loftiest position in this country that any man not a 
 sovereign could hold, and he ranked far higher in the estimation of his 
 countrymen than most of their sovereigns have done. The rescued em- 
 perors and kings of Europe had showered their honours on him. His fame 
 was as completely secured during his lifetime as if death, by removing 
 him from the possibility of making a mistake, had consecrated it. No new 
 war under altered conditions tried the flexibility and the endurance of the 
 military genius which had defeated in turn all Napoleon's great marshals as a 
 prelude to the defeat of Napoleon himself. If ever any mortal may be said to 
 have had in life all he could have desired, Wellington was surely that man. 
 He might have found a new contentment in his honours, if he really cared 
 much about them, in the reflection than he had done nothing for himself, 
 but all for the State. He did not love war. He had no inclination what- 
 ever for it. When Lord John Russell visited Napoleon in Elba, Napoleon 
 asked him whether he thought the Duke of Wellington would be able to 
 live thenceforward without the excitement of war. It was probably in 
 Napoleon's mind that the English soldier would be constantly entangling 
 his country in foreign complications for the sake of gratifying his love for 
 the brave squares of war. Lord John Russell endeavoured to impress 
 upon the great fallen Emperor that the Duke of Wellington would as a 
 matter of course lapse into the place of a simple citizen, and would look 
 with no manner of regret to the stormy days of battle. Napoleon seems to 
 have listened with a sort of melancholy incredulity, and only observed once 
 or twice that ' it was a splendid game, war.' To Wellington it was no 
 splendid game, or game of any eort. It was a stern duty to be done for 
 his Sovereign and his country, and to be got through as quickly as possible.
 
 ,852. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 337 
 
 J'he difference between the two men cannot be better illustrated. It is impos- 
 sible to compare two such men. There is hardly any common basis of com- 
 parison. To say which is the greater, one must first make up his mind a? 
 to whether his standard of greatness is genius or duty. Napoleon lias 
 made a far deeper impression on history. If that be superior greatness, 
 it would be scarcely possible for any national partiality to claim an equal 
 place for Wellington. But Englishmen may be content with the reflection 
 that their hero saved his country, and that Napoleon nearly ruined his. 
 We write this without the slightest inclination to sanction what may be 
 called the British Philistine view of the character of Napoleon. Up to a 
 certain period of his career it seems to us deserving of almost unmingled 
 admiration ; just as his country, in her earlier disputes with the other 
 European Powers, seems to have been almost entirely in the right. But 
 his success and his glory were too strong for Napoleon. He fell for the 
 very want of that simple, steadfast devotion to duty which inspired 
 Wellington always, and which made him seem dignified and great, even in 
 statesmanship for which he was unfitted, and even when in statesmanship 
 he was acting in a manner that would have made another man seem 
 ridiculous rather than respectable. Wellington more nearly resembled 
 Washington than Napoleon. He was a much greater soldier than 
 Washington ; but he was not on the whole so great a man. 
 
 It is fairly to be said for Wellington that the proportions of his per- 
 sonal greatness seem to grow rather than to dwindle as he and his events 
 are removed from us by time. The battle of Waterloo does not indeed 
 stand, as one of its historians has described it, among the decisive battles 
 of the world. It was fought to keep the Bonapartes off the throne of 
 France ; and in twenty-five years after Waterloo, while the victor of 
 Waterloo was yet living, another Bonaparte was preparing to mount that 
 throne. It was the climax of a national policy, which, however justifiable 
 and inevitable it may have become in the end, would hardly now be jus- 
 tified as to its origin by one intelligent Englishman out of twenty. The 
 present age is not, therefore, likely to become rhapsodical over Wellington, 
 as our forefathers might have been, merely because he defeated the French 
 and crushed Napoleon. Yet it is impossible for the coolest mind to study 
 the career of Wellington without feeling a constant glow of admiration for 
 that singular course of simple antique devotion to duty. His was truly 
 the spirit in which a great nation must desire to be served. 
 
 The nation was not ungrateful. It heaped honours on Wellington ; 
 it would have heaped more on him if it knew how. It gave him its almost 
 unqualified admiration. On his death it tried to give him such a public 
 funeral as hero never had. The pageant was indeed a splendid and a gorge- 
 
 VOL. i. z
 
 338 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES CH. xxm. 
 
 ous exhibition. It was not perhaps very well suited to the temperament ami 
 habits of the cold and simple hero to whose honour it was got up. Nor, 
 perhaps, are gorgeous pageants exactly the sort of performance in which as a 
 nation England particularly excels. But in the vast, silent, respectful crowd 
 that thronged theLondon streets a crowd such as no other city in the world 
 could show there was better evidence than pageantry or ceremonial could 
 supply of the esteem in which the living generation held the hero of the 
 last. The name of Wellington had long ceased to represent any hostility 
 of nation to nation. The crowds who filled the streets of London that 
 day had no thought of the kind of sentiment which used to fill the breasts 
 of their fathers when France and Napoleon were named. They honoured 
 Wellington only as one who had always served his country ; as the soldier 
 of England and not as the invader of France, or even as the conqueror of 
 Napoleon. The homage to his memory was as pure of selfish passion as 
 his own career. 
 
 The new Parliament was called together in November. It brought into 
 public life in England a man who afterwards made some mark in our poli- 
 tics, and whose intellect and debating power seemed at one time to promise 
 him a position inferior to that of hardly anyone in the House of Commons. 
 This was Mr. Robert Lowe, who had returned from one of the Australian 
 colonies to enter political life in his native country. Mr. Lowe was a 
 scholar of a highly cultured order ; and, despite some serious defects of 
 delivery, he proved to be a debater of the veiy highest class, especially 
 gifted with the weapons of sarcasm, scorn, and invective. He was a 
 Liberal in the intellectual sense ; he was opposed to all restraints on edu- 
 cation and on the progress of a career ; but he had a detestation for demo- 
 cratic doctrines which almost amounted to a mania. He despised with 
 the whole force of a temperament very favourable to intellectual scorn 
 alike the rural Tory and the town Radical. His opinions were generally 
 rather negative than positive. He did not seem to have any very positive 
 opinions of any kind where politics were concerned. He was governed by 
 a detestation of abstractions and sentimentalities, and ' views ' of all sorts. 
 An intellectual Don Juan of the political world, he believed with Moliere's 
 hero that two and two make four, and that four and four make eight, and 
 he was impatient of any theory which would commend itself to the mind 
 on less rigorous evidence. If contempt for the intellectual weaknesses of 
 an opposing party or doctrine could have made a great politician, Mr. 
 Lowe would have won that name. In politics, however, criticism is not 
 enough. One must be able to originate, to mould the will of others, to 
 compromise, to lead while seeming to follow, often to follow while seeming 
 to lead. Of gifts like these Mr. Lowe had no share. He never became 
 more than a great Parliamentary critic of the ncrid and vitriolic style
 
 J852. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 339 
 
 Almost immediately on the assembling ol' the new Parliament, Mr. 
 Villiers brought forward a resolution not merely pledging the House of 
 Commons to a Free Trade policy, but pouring out a sort of censure on 
 all who had hitherto failed to recognise its worth. This step was thought 
 necessary, and was indeed made necessary by the errors of which Lord 
 Derby had been guilty, and the preposterous vapourings of some of his 
 less responsible followers. If the resolution had been passed, the Govern- 
 ment must have resigned. They were willing enough now to agree to 
 any resolution declaring that Free Trade was the established policy of the 
 country ; but they could not accept the triumphant eulogium which the 
 resolution proposed to offer to the commercial policy of the years when 
 they were the uncompromising enemies of that very policy. They could 
 submit to the punishment imposed on them ; but they did not like this 
 public kissing of the rod and doing penance. Lord Palmerston, who even 
 up to that time regarded his ultimate acceptance of office under Lord 
 Derby as a not impossible event if once the Derby party could shake 
 themselves quite free of Protection, devised an amendment which afforded 
 them the means of a more or less honourable retreat. This resolution 
 pledged the House to the ' policy of unrestricted competition firmly main- 
 tained and prudently extended ' ; but recorded no panegyric of the legis- 
 lation of 1846, and consequent condemnation of those who opposed that 
 legislation. The amendment was accepted by all but the small band of 
 irreconcilable Protectionists : 468 voted for it ; only 53 against it ; and 
 the moan of Protection was made. All that long chapter of English 
 legislation was closed. Various commercial and other ' interests ' did 
 indeed afterwards demur to the application of the principle of unrestricted 
 competition to their peculiar concerns. But they did not plead for Pro- 
 tection. They only contended that the Protection they sought for was 
 not, in fact, Protection at all, but Free Trade under peculiar circumstances. 
 The straightforward doctrine of Protection perished of the debate of No- 
 vember 1852. 
 
 Still the Government only existed on sufferance. Their tenure of 
 office was somewhat rudely compared to that of a bailiff put into posses- 
 sion of certain premises, who is liable to be sent away at any moment 
 when the two parties concerned in the litigation choose to come to terms. 
 There was a general expectation that the moment Mr. Disraeli came to 
 set out a genuine financial scheme the fate of the Government would be 
 decided. So the event proved. Mr. Disraeli made a financial statement 
 which showed remarkable capacity for dealing with figures. It was sub- 
 jected to a far more serious test than his first budget, for that was neces- 
 sarily a mere stopgap or makeshift. This was a real budget, altering 
 
 z 2
 
 340 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxm. 
 
 and reconstructing the financial system and the taxation of the country. 
 The skill with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer explained his 
 measures and tossed his figures about convinced many even of his strongest 
 opponents that he had the capacity to make a good budget if he only 
 were allowed to do so by the conditions of his party's existence. But his 
 Cabinet had come into office under special obligations to the country 
 party and the farmers. They could not avoid making some experiment 
 in the way of special legislation for the farmers. They had at the very 
 least to put on an appearance of doing something for them. The Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer might be supposed to be in the position of the 
 soldier in Hogarth's ' March to Finchley,' between the rival claimants on 
 his attention. He has promised and vowed to the one ; but he knows 
 that the slightest mark of civility he offers to her will be fiercely resented 
 by the other. When Mr. Disraeli undertook to favour the country interest 
 and the farmers, he must have known only too well that he was setting 
 all the Free Traders and Peelites against him ; and he knew at the same 
 time that if he neglected the country party he was cutting the ground 
 from beneath his feet. The principle of his budget was the reduction of 
 the malt duties and the increase of the inhabited house duty. Some 
 manipulations of the income tax were to be introduced, chiefly with a 
 view to lighten the impost on farmers' profits ; and there was to be a 
 modest reduction of the tea duty. The two points that stood out clear 
 and prominent before the House of Commons were the reduction of the 
 malt duty and the increase of the duty on inhabited houses. The reduc- 
 tion of the malt tax, as Mr. Lowe said in his pungent criticism, was the 
 keystone of the budget. That reduction created a deficit, which the 
 inhabited house duty had to be doubled in order to supply. The scheme 
 was a complete failure. The farmers did not care much about the con- 
 cession which had been made in their favour : those who had to pay for 
 it in doubled taxation were bitterly indignant. Mr. Disraeli had exas- 
 perated the one claimant, and not greatly pleased the other. The Govern- 
 ment soon saw how things were likely to go. The Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer began to see that he had only a desperate fight to make. The 
 Whigs, the Free Traders, the Peelites. and such independent members or 
 unattached members as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Bemal Osborue all fell on him. 
 It became a combat a outrance. It well suited Mr. Disraeli's peculiar 
 temperament. During the whole of his Parliamentary career he has never 
 fought so well as when he has been free to indulge to the full the courage 
 of despair.
 
 1853 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS 341 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 MR. GLADSTONE. 
 
 THE debate was one of the finest of its kind ever heard in Parliament 
 during our time. The excitement on both sides was intense. The rivalry 
 was hot and eager. Mr. Disraeli was animated by all the power of des- 
 peration, and was evidently in a mood neither to give nor to take quarter. 
 He assailed Sir Charles Wood, the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, with 
 a vehemence and even a virulence which certainly added much to the 
 piquancy and interest of the discussion so far as listeners were concerned, 
 but which more than once went to the very verge of the limits of Parlia- 
 mentary decorum. It was in the course of this speech that Disraeli, 
 leaning across the table and directing his words full at Sir Charles Wood, 
 declared, ' I care not to be the right honourable gentleman's critic ; but 
 if he has learned his business, he has yet to learn that petulance is 
 not sarcasm, and that insolence is not invective.' The House had not 
 heard the concluding word of Disraeli's bitter and impassioned speech^ 
 when at two o'clock in the morning Mr. Gladstone leaped to his feet tc 
 answer him. Then began that long Parliamentary duel which only knew 
 a truce when at the close of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli crossed the 
 threshold of the House of Commons for the last time, thenceforward to 
 take his place among the peers as Lord Beaconsfield. During all the in- 
 tervening four-and-twenty years these two men were rivals in power and 
 in Parliamentary debate as much as ever Pitt and Fox had been. Their 
 opposition, like that of Pitt and Fox, was one of temperament and cha- 
 racter as well as of genius, position and political opinion. The rivalry of 
 this first heated and eventful night was a splendid display. Tho^e who 
 had thought it impossible that any impression could be made upon the 
 House after the speech of Mr. Disraeli had to acknowledge that a yet 
 greater impression was produced by the unprepared reply of Mr. Glad- 
 stone. The House divided about four o'clock in the morning, and the 
 Government were left in a minority of nineteen. Mr. Disraeli took the 
 defeat with his characteristic composure. The morning was cold and wet. 
 ' It will be an unpleasant day for going to Osborne,' he quietly remarked 
 to a friend as they went down Westminster Hall together and looked out 
 into the dreary streets. That day, at Osborne, the resignation of the 
 Ministry was formally placed in the hands of the Queen. 
 
 In a few days after, the Coalition Ministry was formed. Lord Aberdeen
 
 342 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. XXIT, 
 
 was Prime Minister ; Lord John Russell took the Foreign Office ; Lord 
 Palmerston became Home Secretary; Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer. The public were a good deal surprised that Lord Palmei - 
 ston had taken such a place as that of Home Secretary. His name had 
 been identified with the foreign policy of England, and it was not sup- 
 posed that he felt the slightest interest in the ordinary business of the 
 Home Department. Palmerston himself explained in a letter to his 
 brother that the Home Office was his own choice. He was not anxious 
 to join the Ministry at all ; and if he had to make one, he preferred that 
 he should hold some office in which he had personally no traditions. ' 1 
 had long settled in my own mind,' he said, ' that I would not go back to 
 the Foreign Office, and that if I ever took any office it should be the 
 Home. It does not do for a man to pass his whole life in one department, 
 and the Home Office deals with the concerns of the country internally and 
 brings one in contact with one's fellow-countrymen ; besides which it gives 
 one more influence in regard to the militia and the defences of the country.' 
 Lord Palmerston in fact announces that he has undertaken the business of 
 the Home Office for the same reason as that given by Fritz, in the 
 ' Grande Duchesse,' for becoming a schoolmaster. ' Can you teach ? ' 
 asks the Grande Duchesse ? ' No,' is the answer , ' c'est pour apprendre ; ' 
 ' I go to learn.' The reader may well suspect, however, that it was not 
 only with a view of learning the business of the internal administration 
 and becoming acquainted with his fellow-countrymen that Palmerston 
 preferred the Home Office. He would not consent to be Foreign Secre- 
 tary on any terms but his own, and these terms were then out of the 
 question. 
 
 The principal interest felt in the new Government was not, however, 
 centred in Lord Palmerston. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer was 
 the man upon whom the eyes of curiosity and interest were chiefly turned. 
 Mr. Gladstone was still a young man in the Parliamentary sense at least. 
 He was but forty-three. His career had been in every way remarkable. 
 He had entered public life at a very early age. He had been, to quote 
 the words of Macaulay, a distinguished debater in the House of Commons 
 ever since he was one-and-twenty. Criticising his book, ' The State in its 
 Relations with the Church,' which was published in 1838, Macaulay speaks 
 of Gladstone as ' a young man of unblemished character and of distin- 
 guished Parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbend- 
 ing Tories who follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader whose experience 
 is indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions 
 they abhor.' The time was not so far away when the stern and unbending 
 Tories would regard Gladstone as the greatest hope of their most bitter
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 enemies. Lord Macaulay goes on to overwhelm the views expressed by 
 Mr. Gladstone as to the relations between State and Church, with a weight 
 of argument and gorgeousness of illustration that now seem to have been 
 hardly called for. One of the doctrines of the young statesman which 
 Macaulay confutes with especial warmth, is the principle which, as he 
 states it, ' would give the Irish a Protestant Church whether they like it 
 or not.' The author of the book which contained this doctrine was the 
 author of the disestablishment of the State Church in Ireland. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone was by birth a Lancashire man. It is not unworthy 
 of notice that Lancashire gave to the Parliaments of recent times their 
 three greatest orators : Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and the late Lord 
 Derby. Mr. Gladstone was born in Liverpool, and was the son of Sir 
 John Gladstone, a Scotchman, who founded a great house in the seaport of 
 the Mersey. He entered Parliament when very young as a protege of the 
 Newcastle family, and he soon faithfully attached himself to Sir Robert Peel. 
 His knowledge of finance, his thorough appreciation of the various needs of 
 a nation's commerce and business, his middle-class origin, all brought him 
 into natural affinity with his great leader. He became a Free Trader with 
 Peel. He was not in the House of Commons, oddly enough, during the 
 session when the Free Trade battle was fought and won. It has already 
 been explained in this history that as he had changed his opinions with his 
 leader he felt a reluctance to ask the support of the Newcastle family for 
 the borough which by virtue of their influence he had previously repre- 
 sented. But except for that short interval his whole career may be pro- 
 nounced one long Parliamentary success. He was from the very first 
 recognised as a brilliant debater, and as one who promised to be an orator ; 
 but it was not until after the death of Sir Robert Peel that ho proved him- 
 self the master of Parliamentary eloquence we all now know him to be. 
 It was he who pronounced what may be called the funeral oration upon 
 Peel in the House of Commons ; but the speech, although undoubtedly 
 inspired by the truest and the deepest feelings, does not seem by any 
 means equal to some of his more recent efforts. There is an appearance 
 of elaboration about it which goes far to mar its effect. Perhaps the first 
 really great speech made by Gladstone was the reply to Disraeli on the 
 memorable December morning which we have just described. That 
 speech put him in the very foremost rank of English orators. Then 
 perhaps he first showed to the full the one great quality in which as a 
 Parliamentary orator he has never had a rival in our time : the readiness 
 which seems to require no preparation, but can marshal all its arguments 
 as if by instinct at a given moment, and the fluency which can pour out 
 I he most eloquent language as freely as though it were but the breath of
 
 344 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxiv 
 
 the nostrils. When, shortly after the formation of the Coalition Ministry, 
 Mr. Gladstone delivered his first budget, it was regarded as a positive 
 curiosity of financial exposition. It was a performance that belonged to 
 the department of the fine arts. The speech occupied several hours, and 
 assuredly no listener wished it the shorter by a single sentence. Pitt, we 
 read, had the same art of making a budget speech a fascinating discourse ; 
 but in our time no minister has had this gift except Mr. Gladstone. Each 
 time that he essayed the same task subsequently he accomplished just the 
 same success. Mr. Gladstone's first oratorical qualification was his exqui- 
 site voice. Such a voice would make commonplace seem interesting and 
 lend something of fascination to dulness itself. It was singularly pure, 
 clear, resonant, and sweet. The orator never seemed to use the slightest 
 effort or strain in filling any hall and reaching the ear of the farthest among 
 the audience. It was not a loud voice or of great volume ; but strong, 
 vibrating and silvery. The words were always aided by energetic action 
 and by the deep gleaming eyes of the orator. Somebody once said that 
 Gladstone was the only man in the House who could talk in italics. The 
 saying was odd, but was nevertheless appropriate and expressive. Glad- 
 stone could by the slightest modulation of his voice give all the emphasis 
 of italics, of small print, or large print, or any other effect he might desire, 
 to his spoken words. It is not to be denied that his wonderful gift of 
 words sometimes led him astray. It was often such a fluency as that of a 
 torrent on which the orator was carried away. Gladstone had to pay for 
 his fluency by being too fluent. He could seldom resist the temptation to 
 shower too many words on his subject and his hearers. Sometimes he 
 involved his sentence in parenthesis within parenthesis until the ordinary 
 listener began to think extrication an impossibility ; but the orator never 
 failed to unravel all the entanglements and to bring the passage out to a 
 clear and legitimate conclusion. There was never any halt or incoherency, 
 nor did the joints of the sentence fail to fit together in the right way. 
 Hurley once described a famous speech as l a circumgyration of incoherent 
 words.' This description certainly could not be applied even to Mr. 
 Gladstone's most involved passages ; but if some of those were described 
 as a circumgyration of coherent words, the phrase might be considered 
 germane to the matter. His style was commonly too redundant. It seemed 
 as if it belonged to a certain school of exuberant Italian rhetoric. Yet 
 it was hardly to be called florid. Gladstone indulged in few flowers of 
 rhetoric, and his great gift was not imagination. His fault was simply 
 the habitual use of too many words. This defect was indeed a charac- 
 teristic of' the Peelite school of eloquence. Mr. Gladstone retained some 
 of the defects of the school in which he had been trained, even after he had 
 come to surpass its greatest master.
 
 IMS. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 345 
 
 Often, however, this superb, exuberant rush of words added indescrib- 
 able strength to the eloquence of the speaker. In passages of indignant 
 remonstrance or denunciation, when word followed word, and stroke came 
 down upon stroke, with a wealth of resource that seemed inexhaustible, 
 the very fluency and variety of the speaker overwhelmed his audience. 
 Interruption only gave him a new stimulus, and appeared to supply him 
 with fresh resources of argument and illustration. His retorts leaped to 
 his lips. His eye caught sometimes even the mere gesture that indicated 
 dissent or question ; and perhaps some unlucky opponent who was only 
 thinking of what might be said in opposition to the great orator found 
 himself suddenly dragged into the conflict and overwhelmed with a torrent 
 of remonstrance, argument, and scornful words. Gladstone had not much 
 humour of the playful kind, but he had a certain force of sarcastic and 
 scornful rhetoric. He was always terribly in earnest. Whether the sub- 
 ject were great or small, he threw his whole soul into it. Once, in address- 
 ing a schoolboy gathering, he told his young listeners that if a boy ran he 
 ought always to run as fast as he could ; if he jumped, he ought always to 
 jump as far as he could. He illustrated his maxim in his own career. He 
 had no idea apparently of running or jumping in such measure as happened 
 to please the fancy of the moment. He always exercised his splendid 
 powers to the uttermost strain. 
 
 A distinguished critic once pronounced Mr. Gladstone to be the greatest 
 Parliamentary orator of our time, on the ground that he had made by far 
 the greatest number of fine speeches, while admitting that two or three 
 speeches had been made by other men of the day which might rank higher 
 than any of his. This is, however, a principle of criticism which posterity 
 never sanctions. The greatest speech, the greatest poem, give the author 
 the highest place, though the effort were but single. Shakespeare would 
 rank beyond Massinger just as he does now had he written only ' The 
 Tempest.' \Ve cannot say how many novels, each as good as ' Gil Bias,' 
 would make Le Sage the equal of Cervantes. On this point fame is inexor- 
 able. We are not, therefore, inclined to call Mr. Gladstone the greatest 
 English orator of our time when we remember some of the finest speeches 
 of Mr. Bright ; but did we regard Parliamentary speaking as a mere 
 instrument of Parliamentary business and debate, then unquestionably 
 Mr. Gladstone is not only the greatest, but by far the greatest English 
 orator of our time ; for he had a richer combination of gifts than any other 
 man we can remember, and he could use them oftenest with effect. He 
 was like a racer which cannot indeed always go faster than every rival, 
 but can win more races in the year than any other horse. Mr. Gladstone 
 aould get up at any moment, and no matter how many times a night, in
 
 346 A HISTOBY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. xx.v. 
 
 the House of Commons, and be argumentative or indignant, pour out a 
 stream of impassioned eloquence or a shower of figures just as the exi- 
 gency of the debate and the moment required. He was not, of course, 
 always equal ; but he was always eloquent and effective. He seemed as 
 if he could not be anything but eloquent. Perhaps, judged in this way, 
 he never had an equal in the English Parliament. Neither Pitt nor Fox 
 ever made so many speeches combining so many great qualities. Chatham 
 was a great actor rather than a great orator. Burke was the greatest 
 political essayist who ever addressed the House of Commons. Canning 
 did not often rise above the level of burnished rhetorical commonplace. 
 Macaulay, who during his time drew the most crowded houses of any 
 speaker, not even excepting Peel, was not an orator in the true sense. 
 Probably no one, past or present, had in combination so many gifts of voice, 
 manner, fluency and argument, style, reason and passion, as Mr. Gladstone. 
 The House of Commons was his ground. There he was himself; 
 there he was always seen to the best advantage. As a rule, he was not so 
 successful on the platform. His turn of mind did not fit him well for the 
 work of addressing great public meetings. He loved to look too carefully 
 at every side of a question, and did not always go so quickly to the heart 
 of it as would suit great popular audiences. The principal defect of his 
 mind was probably a lack of simplicity, a tendency to over-refining and 
 supersubtle argument. Not perhaps unnaturally, however, when he did, 
 during some of the later passages of his career, lay himself out for the 
 work of addressing popular audiences, he threw away all discrimination, 
 and gave loose to the full force with which, under the excitement of great 
 pressure, he was wont to rush at a principle. There seemed a certain lack 
 of balance in his mind ; a want of the exact poise of all his faculties. 
 Either he must refine too much or he did not refine at all. Thus he 
 became accused, and with some reason, of over-refining and all but quib- 
 bling in some of his Parliamentary arguments ; of looking at all sides of 
 a question so carefully that it was too long in doubt whether he was ever 
 going to form any opinion of his own ; and he was sometimes accused with 
 equal justice of pleading one side of a political cause before great meetings 
 of his countrymen with all the passionate blindness of a partisan. The 
 accusations might seem self -contradictory, if we did not remember that 
 they will apply, and with great force and justice, to Burke. Burke cut 
 blocks with a razor, and went on refining to an impatient House of Com- 
 mons, only eager for its dinner; and the same Burke threw himself into 
 antagonism to the French Revolution as if he were the wildest of partisans; 
 as if the question had but one side, and only fools or villains cculd possibly 
 say it had any other.
 
 1863. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 347 
 
 Mr. Gladstone grow slowly into Liberal convictions. At the time 
 when he joined the Coalition Ministry he was still regarded as one who 
 had scarcely left the camp of Toryism, and who had only joined that 
 Ministry because it was a coalition. Years after he was applied to by the 
 late Lord Derby to join a Ministry formed by him ; and it was not sup- 
 posed that there was anything unreasonable in the proposition. The first 
 impulse towards Liberal principles was given to his mind probably by his 
 change with his leader from Protection to Free Trade. When a man like 
 Gladstone saw that his traditional principles and those of his party had 
 broken down in any one direction, it was but natural that he should begin 
 to question their endurance in other directions. The whole fabric of belief 
 was built up together. Gladstone's was a mind of that order that sees a 
 principle in everything, and must, to adopt the phrase of a great preacher, 
 make the ploughing as much a part of religious duty as the praying. The 
 interests of religion seemed to him bound up with the creed of Conserva- 
 tism ; the principles of Protection must probably at one time have seemed 
 a part of the whole creed of which one article was as sacred as another. 
 His intellect and his principles, however, found themselves compelled to 
 follow the guidance of his leader in the matter of Free Trade ; and when 
 inquiry thus began it was not very likely soon to stop. He must have 
 seen how much the working of such a principle as that of Protection 
 became a class interest in England, and how impossible it would have been 
 for it to continue long in existence under an extended and a popular 
 suffrage. In other countries the fallacy of Protection did not show itself 
 so glaringly in the eyes of the poorer classes, for in other countries it was 
 not the staple food of the population that became the principal object of a 
 protective duty. But in England the bread on which the poorest had to 
 live was made to pay a tax for the benefit of landlords and farmers. As 
 long as one believed this to be a necessary condition of a great unquestion- 
 able creed, it was easy for a young statesman to reconcile himself to it. 
 It might bear cruelly on individuals, or even multitudes ; but so would 
 the law of gravitation, as Mill has remarked, bear harshly on the best of 
 men when it dashed him down from a height and bioke his bones. It 
 would be idle to question the existence of the law on that account; or to 
 disbelieve the whole teaching of the physical science which explains it" 
 movements. But when Mr. Gladstone came to be convinced that there 
 was no such law as the Protection principle at all ; that it was a mere 
 sham ; that to believe in it was to be guilty of an economic heresy then 
 it was impossible for him not to begin questioning the genuineness of the 
 whole system of political thought of which it formed but a part. Perhaps, 
 too, he was impelled towards Liberal principles at home by seeing wh;it
 
 348 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xxrr. 
 
 the effects of opposite doctrines had been abroad. He rendered memorable 
 service to the Liberal cause of Europe by his eloquent protest against the 
 brutal treatment of Baron Poerio and other Liberals of Naples who were 
 imprisoned by the Neapolitan king a protest which Garibaldi declared to 
 have sounded the first trumpet-call of Italian liberty. In rendering ser- 
 vice to Liberalism and to Europe he rendered service also to his own 
 intelligence. He helped to set free his own spirit as well as the Neapolitan 
 people. We find him, as his career goes on, dropping the traditions of his 
 youth, always rising higher in Liberalism, and not going back. One of 
 the foremost of his compeers, and his only actual rival in popular elo- 
 quence, eulogised him as always struggling towards the light. The 
 common taunts addressed to public men who have changed their opinions 
 were hardly ever applied to him. Even his enemies felt that the one idea 
 always inspired him a conscientious anxiety to do the right thing. None 
 accused him of being one of the politicians who mistake, as Victor Hugo 
 says, a weathercock for a flag. With many qualities which seemed hardly 
 suited to a practical politician ; with a sensitive and eager temper, like 
 that of Canning, and a turn for theological argument that as a rule Eng- 
 lishmen do not love in a statesman; with an impetuosity that often carried 
 him far astray, and a deficiency of those genial social qualities that go so 
 far to make a public success in England, Mr. Gladstone maintained 
 through the whole of his career a reputation against which there was 
 hardly a serious cavil. The worst thing that was said of him was that he 
 was too impulsive, and that his intelligence was too restless. He was an 
 essayist, a critic, a Homeric scholar ; a dilettante in art, music, and old 
 china; he was a theological controversialist ; he was a political economist, 
 H financier, a practical administrator whose gift of mastering details has 
 hardly ever been equalled ; he was a statesman and an orator. No man 
 could attempt so many things and not occasionally make himself the 
 subject of a sneer. The intense gravity and earnestness of Gladstone's 
 rnind always, however, saved him from the special penalty of such versa- 
 tility ; no satirist described him as not one, but all mankind's epitome. 
 
 As yet, however, he is only the young statesman who was the other 
 day the hope of the more solemn and solid Conversatives, and in whom 
 they have not even yet entirely ceased to put some faith. The Coalition 
 Ministry was so formed that it was not supposed a man necessarily nailed 
 his colours to any mast when he joined it. More than one of Gladstone's 
 earliest friends and political associates had a part in it. The Ministry 
 might undoubtedly be called an Administration of All the Talents. 
 1'lxcept the late Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, it included almost every 
 nan of real ability who belonged to ei/her of the two grea* parties of the
 
 1853. A HISTORY Ol' - OUR OWN TIMES. 349 
 
 State. The Manchester school had, of course, no place there ; hut they 
 were not likely just yet to be recognised as constituting one of the elements 
 out of which even a Coalition Ministry might be composed. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE EASTERN QUESTION. 
 
 FOR forty years England had been at peace. There had indeed been little 
 wars here and there with some of her Asiatic and African neighbours ; 
 and once or twice, as in the instance of the quarrel between Turkey and 
 Egypt, she had been menaced for a moment with a dispute of a more for- 
 midable kind and nearer home. But the trouble had passed away, and 
 from Waterloo downward England had known no real war. The new 
 generation were growing up in a kind of happy belief that wars were 
 things of the past for us ; out of fashion ; belonging to a ruder and less 
 tational society, like the wearing of armour and the carrying of weapons 
 in the civil streets. It is not surprising if it seemed possible to many 
 that the England of the future might regard the instruments and the ways 
 of war with the same curious wonder as that which Virgil assumes would 
 one day fill the minds of the rustic labourers whose ploughs turned up on 
 some h'eld of ancient battle the rusted swords and battered helmets of 
 forgotten warriors. During all the convulsions of the Continent, England 
 had remained undisturbed. When bloody revolutions were storming 
 through other capitals, London was smiling over the dispersion of the 
 Chartists by a few special constables. When the armies of Austria, of 
 Russia, of France, of Sardinia were scattered over vast and various con- 
 tinental battle-grounds, our troops were passing in peaceful pageantry of 
 review before the well-pleased eyes of their Sovereign in some stately 
 royal park. A new school as well as a new generation had sprung up. 
 This school, full of faith but full of practical shrewd logic as well, was 
 teaching with great eloquence and effect that the practice of settling inter- 
 national controversy by the sword was costly, barbarous, and blundering 
 as well as wicked. The practice of the duel in England had utterly gone 
 out. Battle was for ever out of fashion as a means of settling private 
 controversy in England. Why then should it be unreasonable to believe 
 that the like practice among nations might soon become equally obsolete ? 
 Such certainly was the faith of a great many intelligent persons at 
 the time when the Coalition Ministry was formed. The majority tacitly 
 acquiesced in the belief without thinking much about it They had never
 
 350 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XXT, 
 
 in their time seen England engaged in European war ; and it was natural 
 to assume that what they had never seen they were never likely to see. 
 Anyone who retraces attentively the history of English public opinion at 
 that time will easily find evidence enough of a commonly accepted under- 
 standing that England had done with great wars. Even then perhaps a 
 shrewd observer might have been inclined to conjecture that by the very 
 force of reaction a change would soon set in. Man, said Lord Palmerston, 
 is by nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. This was one of those 
 smart saucy generalisations characteristic of its author, and which used to 
 provoke many graver and more philosophic persons ; but which neverthe- 
 less often got at the heart of a question in a rough and ready sort of way. 
 In the season of which we are now speaking, it was not, however, the 
 common belief that man was by nature a fighting and a quarrelling 
 animal at least in England. Bad government, the arbitrary power of an 
 aristocracy, the necessity of finding occupation for a standing army, the 
 ambitions of princes, the misguiding lessons of romance and poetry : 
 these and other influences had converted man into an instrument of war. 
 Leave him to his own impulses, his own nature, his own idea of self- 
 interest, and the better teachings of wiser guides, and he is sure to remain 
 in the paths of peace. Such was the common belief of the year or two 
 after the Great Exhibition the belief fervently preached by a few and 
 accepted without contradiction by the majority, as most common beliefs 
 are the belief floating in the air of the time, and becoming part of the 
 atmosphere in which the generation was brought up. Suddenly all this 
 happy quiet faith was disturbed, and the long peace, which the hero of 
 Tennyson's ' Maud ' says he thought no peace, was over and done. The 
 hero of ' Maud ' had, it will be observed, the advantage of explaining his 
 convictions after the war had broken out. The name was indeed legion of 
 those who, under the same conditions, discovered like him that they had 
 never relished the long long peace, or believed in it much as a peace at all. 
 The Eastern Question it was that disturbed the dream of peace. The 
 use of such phrases as ' the Eastern Question,' borrowed chiefly from the 
 political vocabulary of France, is not in general to be commended ; but 
 we can in this instance find no more ready and convenient way of express- 
 ing clearly and precisely the meaning of the crisis which had arisen in 
 Europe. It was strictly the Eastern ' question ' the question OL what to 
 do with the East of Europe. It was certain that things could not remain 
 as they then were, and nothing else was certain. The Ottoman Power 
 had been settled during many centuries in the South-east of Europe. It 
 had come in there as a conqueror, and had remained there only as a con- 
 queror occupies the ground hi.s tents are covering. The Turk had mvny
 
 1853, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 351 
 
 of the Btrong qualities and even the virtues of a great warlike conqueror ; 
 but he had no capacity or care for the arts of peace. He never thought 
 of assimilating himself to those whom he had conquered, or them to him. 
 He disdained to learn anything from them ; he did not care whether 
 or no they learned anything from him. It has been well remarked, 
 tnat of all the races who conquered Greeks, the Turks alone learned 
 nothing from their gifted captives. Captive Greece conquered all the 
 world except the Turks. They defied her. She could not teach them 
 letters or arts, commerce or science. The Turks were not, as a rule, 
 oppressive to the races that lived under them. They were not habitual 
 persecutors of the faiths they deemed heretical. In this respect they 
 often contrasted favourably with States that ought to have been able 
 to show them a better example. In truth, the Turk for the most 
 part was disposed to look with disdainful composure on what he con- 
 sidered the religious follies of the heretical races who did not believe in 
 the Prophet. They were objects of his scornful pity rather than of his 
 anger. Every now and then, indeed, some sudden fierce outburst of 
 fanatical cruelty towards some of the subject sects horrified Europe, and 
 reminded her that the conqueror who had settled himself down in her 
 south-eastern corner was still a barbarian who had no right, or place in 
 civilised life. But as a rule the Turk did not care enough about the races 
 he ruled over to feel the impulses of the perverted fanaticism which would 
 strive to scourge men into the faith itself believes needful to salvation. 
 
 At one time there can be little doubt that all the Powers of civilised 
 Europe would gladly have seen the Turk driven out of our Continent. 
 But the Turk was powerful for a long series of generations, and it seemed 
 for a while rather a question whether he would not send the Europeans 
 out of their own grounds. He was for centuries the great terror, the 
 nightmare, of Western Europe. When he began to decay, and when his 
 aggressive strength was practically all gone, it might have been thought 
 that the Western Powers would then have managed somehow to get rid of 
 him. But in the meantime the condition of Europe had greatly changed. 
 No one not actually subject to the Turk was afraid of him any more; 
 and other States had arisen strong for aggression. The uncertainties of 
 these States as to the intentions of their neighbours and each other proved 
 a better bulwark for the Turks than any warlike strength of their own 
 could any longer have furnished. The growth of the great Russian 
 empire was of itself enough to change the whole conditions of the problem, 
 
 Nothing in our times has been more remarkable than the sudden 
 growth of Russia. The rise of the United States is not so wonderful; for 
 the men who made the United States were civilized men ; men of our own
 
 352 A HISTOKY OF OUK, OWN TIMES. CH. xxv 
 
 race who might be expected to make a way for themselves anywhere, and 
 who were, moreover, put by destiny in possession of a vast and splendid 
 continent having all variety of climate and a limitless productiveness ; and 
 where they had no neighbours or rivals to molest them. But Russia was 
 peopled by a race who even down to our own times remain in many 
 respects little better than semi-barbarous ; and she had enemies and ob- 
 stacles on all sides. A few generations ago Eussia was literally an inland 
 State. She was shut up in the heart of Eastern Europe as if in a prison. 
 The genius, the craft and the audacity of Peter the Great first broke the 
 narrow bounds set to the Russia of his day and extended her frontier to 
 the sea. He was followed after a reign or two by a woman of genius, 
 daring, unscrupulousness, and profligacy equal to his own ; the greatest 
 woman probably who ever sat on a throne, Elizabeth of England not even 
 excepted. Catherine the Second so ably followed the example of Peter 
 the Great, that she extended the Russian frontier in directions which he 
 had not had opportunity to stretch to. By the time her reign was done 
 Russia was one of the Great Powers of Europe, entitled to enter into ne- 
 gotiations on a footing of equality with the proudest States of the Conti- 
 nent. Unlike Turkey, Russia had always shown a yearning after the 
 latest development of science and of civilisation. There was something 
 <jven of affectation, provoking the smiles of an older and more ingrained 
 culture, in the efforts persistently made by Russia to put on the garments 
 of Western civilisation. Catherine the Great, in especial, had set the 
 example in this way. She invited Diderot to her court. She adorned 
 her cabinet with a bust of Charles James Fox. While some of the per- 
 sonal habits of herself and of those who surrounded her at court would 
 have seemed too rude and coarse for Esquimaux, and while she was put- 
 ting down free opinion at home with a severity Avorthy only of some 
 mediaeval Asiatic potentate, she was always talking as though she were a 
 disciple of Rousseau's ideas and a pupil of Chesterfield's manners. This 
 may have seemed ridiculous enough sometimes ; and even in our own 
 days the contrast between the professions and the practices of Russia is a 
 familiar subject of satire. But in nations at least the homage which 
 imitation pays often wins for half-conscious hypocrisy as much success as 
 earnest and sincere endeavour. A nation that tries to appear more civil- 
 ised than it really is ends very often by becoming more civilised than its 
 neighbours ever thought it likely to be. 
 
 The wars against Napoleon brought Russia into close alliance with 
 England, Austria, Prussia, and other European States of old and advanced 
 civilisation. Russia was, during one part of that great struggle, the 
 leading spirit of the alliance against Napoleon. Her soldiers were seen in
 
 ,868. A HISTORY OF OUR OWIS TIMES. 353 
 
 Italy and in France, as well as in the East of Europe. Tin: .semi-savage 
 State became in the eyes of Europe a power charged along with others with 
 the protection of the conservative interests of the Continent. She waa 
 recognised as a valuable friend and a most formidable enemy. Gradually 
 it became evident that she could be aggressive as well as conservative. In 
 the war between Austria and Hungary, Russia intervened and conquered 
 Austria's rebellious Hungarians for her. Russia had already earned tho 
 hatred of European Liberals by her share in the partition of Poland and 
 her manner of dealing with the Poles. Ailer a while it grew to be 
 a fixed conviction in the mind of the Liberalism of Western Europe that 
 Russia was the greatest obstacle then existing in civilisation to the spread 
 of popular ideas. The Turk was comparatively harmless in that sense. 
 He was well content now, so much had his ancient ambition shrunk and 
 his ancient war spirit gone out, if his strong and restless neighbours would 
 only let him alone. But he was brought at more than one point into 
 especial collision with Russia. Many of the provinces he ruled over in 
 European Turkey were of Sclavonian race and of the religion of the 
 Greek Church. They were thus affined by a double tie to the Russian 
 people, and therefore the manner in which Turkey dealt with those pro- 
 vinces was a constant source of dispute between Russia and her. The 
 Russians are a profoundly religious people. No matter what one may 
 think of their form of faith, no matter how he may sometimes observe 
 that religious profession contrasts with the daily habits of life, yet he can- 
 not but see that the Russian character is steeped in religious faith or 
 fanaticism. To the Russian fanatic there was something intolerable in the 
 .thought of a Sclave population, professing the religion of the orthodox 
 Church, being persecuted by the Turks. No Russian ruler could hope to 
 be popular who ventured to show a disregard for the national sentiment on 
 this subject. The Christian populations of Turkey were to the Russian 
 sovereigns what the Germans of Schleswig-Holstein were to the great 
 German princes of later years, an indirect charge to which they could not, 
 if they would, profess any indifference. A German prince, in order to be 
 popular, had to proclaim himself enthusiastic about the cause of Schleswig- 
 Holstein ; a Russian emperor could not be loved if he did not declare his 
 undying resolve to be the protector of the Christian populations of Turkey. 
 Much of this was probably sincere and single-minded on the part of the 
 Russian people and most of the Russian politicians. But the other States 
 of Europe began to suspect that mingled up with benign ideas of protect- 
 ing the Christian populations of Turkey might be a desire to extend the 
 frontier of Russia to the southward in a new direction. Europe had seen 
 by what craft and what audacious enterprises Russia had managed to ex- 
 
 VOL. I. A A
 
 354 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxv. 
 
 tend her empire to the sea in other quarters; it began to be commonly 
 believed that her next object of ambition would be the possession of Con- 
 stantinople and the Bosphorus. It was reported that a will of Peter the 
 Great had left it as an injunction to his successors to turn all the efforts of 
 their policy towards that object. The particular document which was 
 believed to be a will of Peter the Great enjoined on all succeeding Russian 
 sovereigns never to relax in the extension of their territory northward on 
 the Baltic and southward on the Black Sea shores, and to encroach as far 
 as possible in the direction of Constantinople and the Indies. ' To work out 
 this, raise wars continually at one time against Turkey, at another 
 against. Persia ; make dockyards on the Black Sea ; by degrees make 
 yourselves masters of that sea as well as of the Baltic ; hasten the decay of 
 Persia, and penetrate to the Persian Gulf; establish, if possible, the 
 ancient commerce of the East via Syria, and push on to the Indies, which 
 are the entrepot of the world. Once there you need not fear the gold of 
 England.' We now know that the alleged will was not genuine ; but 
 there could be little doubt that the policy of Peter and of his great follower 
 Catherine would have been in thorough harmony with, such a project. 
 It therefore seemed to be the natural business of other European Powers 
 to see that the defects of the Ottoman Government, such as they were, 
 should not be made an excuse for helping Russia to secure the objects of 
 her special ambition. One great Power, above all the rest, had an interest 
 in watching over every movement that threatened in any way to interfere 
 with the highway to India ; still more with her peaceful and secure pos- 
 session of India herself. That Power, of course, was England. England, 
 Russia, and Turkey were alike in one respect': they were all Asiatic as 
 well as European Powers. But Turkey could never come into any manner 
 of collision with the interests of England in the East. The days of 
 Turkey's interfering with any great State were long over. Neither Russia 
 nor England nor any other Power in Europe or Asia feared her any 
 more. On the contrary, there seemed something like a natural antagonism 
 between England and Russia in the East. The Russians were extending 
 their frontier towards that of our Indian empire. They were showing in 
 that quarter the same mixture of craft and audacity which had stood them 
 in good stead in various parts of Europe. Our officers and diplomatic 
 emissaries reported that they were continually confronted by the evidences 
 of Russian intrigue in Central Asia. We have already seen how much 
 influence the real or supposed intrigues of Russia had in directing our 
 policy in Afghanistan. Doubtless there was some exaggeration and some 
 panic in all the tales that were told of Russian intrigue. Sometimes the 
 alarm spread by these talcs conjured up a kind of Russian hobgoblin,
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TJ.MivS. 355 
 
 bewildering the minds of public servants and making even statesmen 
 occasionally seem like affrighted children. The question that at present 
 concerns us is not whether all the apprehensions of danger from Russia 
 were just and reasonable, but whether as a matter of fact they did exist. 
 They certainly counted for a great deal in determining the attitude of 
 the English people towards both Turkey and Russia. It was in great 
 measure out of these alarms that there grew up among certain statesmen 
 and classes in this country the conviction that the maintenance of the in- 
 tegrity of the Turkish empire was part of the national duty of England. 
 
 It is not too much, therefore, to say that the States of Europe generally 
 desired the maintenance of the Ottoman empire simply because it W;IH. 
 believed that while Turkey held her place she was a barrier against vague 
 dangers which it was not worth while encountering as long as they could 
 possibly be averted. Sharply defined, the condition of things was this : 
 Russia, by reason of her sympathy of religion or race with Turkey's 
 Christian, populations, was brought into chronic antagonism with Turkey ; 
 England, by reason of her Asiatic possessions, was kept in just the same 
 state of antagonism to Russia. The position of England was trying and 
 difficult. She felt herself compelled by the seeming necessity of her 
 national interests to maintain the existence of a Power which on its own 
 merits stood condemned, and for which, as a Power, no English statesman 
 ever cared to say a word. The position of Russia had more plausibility 
 about it. It sounded better when described in an official document or a 
 popular appeal. Russia was the religious State which had made it her 
 mission and her duty to protect the suffering Christians of Turkey. 
 England, let her state her case no matter how carefully or frankly, could 
 only affirm that her motive in opposing Russia was the protection of her 
 own interests. One inconvenient result o this condition of tilings was 
 that, here among English people, there was always a wide difference of 
 opinion as to the national policy with regard to Russia and Turkey. Many 
 public men of great ability and influence were of opinion that England 
 had no right to uphold the Ottoman power because of any fancied danger 
 that might come to us from its fall. It was the simple duty of England, 
 they insisted, to be just and fear not. In private life, they contended, we 
 should all abhor a man who assisted a ruffian to live in a house which he 
 had only got into as a burglar, merely because there was a chance that the 
 dispossession of the ruffian might enable his patron's rival in business to 
 become the owner of the premises. The duty, they insisted, of a con- 
 scientioiis man is clear. He must not patronise a ruffian, whatever 
 comes. Let what will happen, that he must not do. So it was, according 
 to their argument, with national policy. We are not concerned in dis- 
 
 A. A 2
 
 356 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMEfc. CH. XXT. 
 
 cussing this question just now; we are merely acknowledging a fact which 
 came to be of material consequence when the crisis arose that threw 
 England into sudden antagonism with Russia. 
 
 That crisis came about during the later years of the reign of the 
 Emperor Nicholas. He saw its opening, but not the close of even its first 
 volume. Nicholas was a man of remarkable character. He had many of 
 the ways of an Asiatic despot. He had a strong ambition, a fierce and 
 fitful temper, a daring but sometimes too a vacillating will. He had many 
 magnanimous and noble qualities, and moods of sweetness and gentleness, 
 He reminded people sometimes of an Alexander the Great ; sometimes of 
 ihe ' Arabian Nights ' version of Haroun Alraschid. A certain excitability 
 ran through the temperament of all his house, which, in some of its 
 members, broke into actual madness, and in others prevailed no farther 
 than to lead to wild outbreaks of temper such as those that often convulsed 
 the frame and distorted the character of a Charles the Bold or a Coeur de 
 Lion. We cannot date the ways and characters of Nicholas's family from 
 the years of Peter the Great. We must, for tolerably obvious reasons, be 
 content to deduce their origin from the reign of Catherine II. The 
 extraordinary and almost unparalleled conditions of the early married life 
 of that much-injured, much-injuring woman, would easily account for any 
 iberrations of intellect and will among her immediate descendants. Her 
 son was a madman ; there was madness or something very like it among 
 the brothers of the Emperor Nicholas. The Emperor at one time was 
 very popular in England. He had visited the Queen, and he had impressed 
 every one by his noble presence, his lofty stature, his singular personal 
 beauty, his blended dignity and familiarity of manner. He talked as if 
 he had no higher ambition than to be in friendly alliance with England. 
 When he wished to convey his impression of the highest degree of personal 
 loyalty and honour, he always spoke of the word of an English gentleman. 
 There can, indeed, be little doubt that the Emperor was sincerely anxious 
 to keep on terms of cordial friendship with England , and, what is more, 
 had no idea until the very last that the way he was walking was one which 
 England could not consent to tread. His brother and predecessor had 
 been in close alliance with England ; his own ideal hero was the Duke of 
 Wellington ; he had made up his mind that when the division of the spoils 
 of Turkey came about. England arid he could best consult for their own 
 interests and the peace of the world by making the appropriation a matter 
 of joint arrangement. 
 
 We do not often in history find a great despot explaining in advance 
 and in frank words a general policy like that which the Emperor Nicholas 
 cherished with regard to Turkey. We are usually left to infer his schemes
 
 1844-53. A HIS10RY OK OUR OWN TIMES. 357 
 
 from his acts. Not uncommonly we have to set his acts and the fair 
 inferences from them against his own positive and repeated assurances. 
 But in the case of the Emperor Nicholas we are left in no such doubt. 
 He told England exactly what he proposed to do. He told the story 
 twice over ; more than that, he consigned it to writing for our clearer 
 understanding. When he visited England in 1844, for the second time, 
 Nicholas had several conversations with the Duke of Wellington and with 
 Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Secretary, about Turkey and her prospects, 
 and what would be likely to happen in the event of her dissolution, which 
 he believed to be imminent. When he returned to Russia he had a 
 memorandum drawn up by Count Nesselrode, his Chancellor, embodying 
 the views which, according to Nicholas's impressions, were entertained 
 alike by him and by the British statesmen with whom he had been con- 
 versing. Mr. Kinglake says that he sent this document to England with 
 the view of covering his retreat, having met with no encouragement from 
 the English statesmen. Our idea of the matter is different. It may be 
 taken for granted that the English statesmen did not give Nicholas any 
 encouragement, or at least that they did not intend to do so ; but it seems 
 clear to us that he believed they had done so. The memorandum drawn 
 up by Count Nesselrode is much more like a formal reminder or record 
 of a general and oral engagement than a withdrawal from a proposal which 
 was evidently not likely to be accepted. The memorandum set forth that 
 Russia and England were alike penetrated by the conviction that it was 
 for their common interest that the Ottoman empire should maintain itself 
 in its existing independence and extent of territory, and that they had an 
 equal interest in averting all the dangers that might place its safety in 
 jeopardy. With this object, the memorandum declared, the essential 
 point was to suffer the Porte to live in repose without needlessly disturb- 
 ing it by diplomatic; bickering. Turkey, however, had a habit of con- 
 stantly breaking her engagements; and the memorandum insisted strongly 
 that while she kept up this practice it was impossible for her integrity to 
 be secure ; and this practice of hers was indulged in because she believed 
 she might do so with impunity, reckoning on the mutual jealousies of the 
 Cabinets, and thinking that if she failed in her engagements towards one of 
 them, the rest would espouse her cause. ' As soon as the Porte si mil per- 
 ceive that it is not supported by the other Cabinets, it will give way, and 
 the differences which have arisen will be arranged in a conciliatory 
 manner, without any conflict resulting from them.' The memorandum 
 spoke of the imperative necessity of Turkey being led to treat her Christian, 
 subjects with toleration and mildness. On such conditions it was laid 
 down that England and Russia must alike desire her preservation ; but
 
 358 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. CH. xxv 
 
 the document proceeded to say that, nevertheless, these States could not 
 conceal from themselves the fact that the Ottoman empire contained within 
 itself many elements of dissolution, and that unforeseen events might at 
 any time hasten its fall. ' In the uncertainty which hovers over the future 
 a single fundamental idea seems to admit of a really practical application ; 
 that is, that the danger which may result from a catastrophe in Turkey 
 will be much diminished if in the event of its occurring Eussia and 
 England have come to an understanding as to the course to be taken by 
 them in common. That understanding will be the more beneficial inas- 
 much as it will have the full assent of Austria, between whom and Russia 
 there already exists an entire accord.' This document was sent to London 
 and kept in the archives of the Foreign Office. It was only produced and 
 made public when, at a much later day, the Russian press began to insist 
 that the English Government had always been in possession of the views 
 of Russia in regard to Turkey. It seems to us evident that the Emperor 
 of Russia really believed that his views were shared by English statesmen. 
 The mere fact that his memorandum was received and retained in the 
 English Foreign Office might well of itself tend to make Nicholas assume 
 that its principles were recognised by the English Government as the 
 basis of a common action, or at least a common understanding, between 
 England and Russia. Nothing is more easy than to allow a fanatic or a 
 man of one idea to suppose that those to whom he explains his views are 
 convinced by him and in agreement with him. It is only necessary to 
 listen and say nothing. Therefore, it is to be regretted that the English 
 statesmen should have listened to Nicholas without saying something very 
 distinct to show that they were not admitting or accepting any combination 
 of purpose ; or that they should have received his memorandum without 
 some distinct disclaimer of their being in any way bound by its terms. 
 Some of the statements in the memorandum were at the least sufficiently 
 remarkable to have called for comment of some kind from the English 
 statesmen who received it. For example, the Emperor of Russia professed 
 to have in his hands not alone the policy of Russia, but that of Austria as 
 well. lie spoke for Austria, and he stated that he understood himself to 
 be speaking for England too. Accordingly, England, Austria, and Russia 
 were, in his understanding, entering into a secret conspiracy among them- 
 selves for the disposal of the territory of a friendly Power in the event of 
 that Power getting into difficulties. This might surely be thought by the 
 English statesmen to bear an ominous and painful resemblance to the kind 
 of pourparlers that were going on between Russia, Prussia, and Austria 
 before the partition of Poland, and might well have seemed to call lor a 
 strong and unmistakable repudiation on the part of England. We could
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 scarcely have been too emphatic or too precise in conveying to the Emperor 
 of Russia our determination to have nothing to do with any such 
 conspiracy. 
 
 Time went on, and the Emperor thought lie saw an occasion for atill 
 more clearly explaining his plans and for reviving the supposed under- 
 standing with England. Lord Aberdeen came into office as Prime Minister 
 of this country ; Lord Aberdeen who was Foreign .Secretary when Nicholas 
 was in England in 1844. On January 9, 1853, before the re-elections 
 which were consequent upon the new ministerial appointments had yet 
 taken place, the Emperor met our minister, Sir G. Hamilton Seymour, at 
 a party given by the Archduchess Helen, at her palace in St. Petersburg, 
 and he drew him aside and began to talk with him in the most outspoken 
 manner about the future of Turkey and the arrangements it might be 
 necessary for England and Russia to make regarding it. The conversation 
 was renewed again and again afterwards. Few conversations have had 
 greater fame than these. One phrase which the Emperor employed has 
 passed into the familiar political language of the world. As long as there 
 is memory of an Ottoman empire in Europe, so long the Turkey of the 
 days before the Crimean War will be called ' the sick man.' ' We have 
 on our hands,' said the Emperor, 'a sick man a very sick man ; it will 
 be a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us 
 before the necessary arrangements have been made.' The conversations 
 all tended towards the one purpose. The Emperor urged that England 
 and Russia ought to make arrangements beforehand as to the inheritance 
 of the Ottoman in Europe before what he regarded as the approaching 
 and inevitable day when the sick man must come to die. The Emperor 
 explained that he did not contemplate nor would he allow a permanent 
 occupation of Constantinople by Russia ; nor, on the other hand, would he 
 consent to see that city held by England or France or any other great 
 Power. He would not listen to any plans for the reconstruction of Greece 
 in the form of a Byzantine empire, nor would he allow Turkey to be split 
 up into little republics asylums, as he said, for the Ko.isuths and M;izzinis 
 of Europe. It was not made very clear Avhat the Emperor wished to have 
 done with Constantinople, if it was not to be Russian, nor Turkish, nor 
 English, nor French, nor Greek, nor yet a little republic; but it was 
 evident, at all events, that Nicholas had made up his mind as to what it 
 was not to be. He thought that Servia and Bulgaria might become 
 independent States ; that is to say, independent States, such as he con- 
 sidered the Danubian Principalities then to be, ' under my protection.' If 
 the reorganisation of South-Eastern Europe made it seem necessary to 
 England that she should take possession of Egypt, the Emperor said he
 
 ^60 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES CH. xxv. 
 
 should offer no objection. He said the same thing of Candia : if England 
 desired to have that island, he saw no objection. He did not ask for any 
 formal treaty, he said ; indeed, such arrangements as that are not generally 
 consigned to formal treaties ; he only wished for such an understanding as 
 might be come to among gentlemen, and he was satisfied that if he had 
 ten minutes' conversation with Lord Aberdeen the thing could be easily 
 settled. If only England and Russia could arrive at an understanding on 
 the subject, he declared that it was a matter of indifference to him what 
 other Powers might think or say. He spoke of the several millions of 
 Christians in Turkey whose rights he was called upon to watch over, and 
 he remarked the remark is of significance that the right of watching 
 ver them was secured to him by treaty. 
 
 The Emperor Avas evidently under the impression that the interests of 
 England and of Russia were united in this proposed transaction. He had 
 no idea of anything but the most perfect frankness so far as we were con- 
 cerned. It clearly had not occurred to him to suspect that there could be 
 anything dishonourable, anything England might recoil from, in the sugges- 
 tion that the two Powers ought to enter into a plot to divide the sick man's 
 goods between them while the breath was yet in the sick man's body. It 
 did not even occur to him that there could be anything dishonourable in 
 entering into such a compact without the knowledge of any other of the 
 great European Powers. The Emperor desired to act like a man of honour ; 
 but the idea of Western honour Avas as yet new to Russia, and it had not 
 quite got possession of the mind of Nicholas. He Avas like the savage Avho 
 is ambitious of learning the ways of civilisation, and Avho may be counted 
 on to do Avhatever he knoAvs to be in accordance Avith these Avays, but Avho 
 is constantly liable to make a mistake simply from not knowing IIOAV to 
 apply them in each new emergency. The very consequences Avhich came 
 from Nicholas's confidential communications with our minister Avould of 
 themselves testify to his sincerity, and in a certain sense to his simplicity. 
 But the English Government never after the disclosures of Sir Hamilton 
 Seymour put any faith in Nicholas. They regarded him as nothing better 
 than a plotter. They did not probably even make alloAvance enough for 
 the degree of religious or superstitions fervour Avhich accompanied and 
 qualified all his ambition and his craft. Human nature is so oddly blent 
 that Ave ought not to be surprised if Ave find a very high degree of fanatical 
 and sincere fervour in company Avith a crafty selfishness. The English 
 Government and most of the English people ever after looked on Nicholas 
 as a determined plotter and plunderer, Avho Avas not to be made an associate 
 in any engagement. On the other hand, Nicholas Avas as much disappointed 
 as an honest highAvayman of the days of Captain Macheath might have
 
 18-53. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 361 
 
 been who, on making ;i handsome offer of a share in a new enterprise to 
 a trusted and familiar ' pal,' finds that the latter is taken with a fit of vir- 
 tuous indignation and is hurrying off to Bow Street to tell the whole 
 story. 
 
 The English Minister and the English Government could only answer 
 the Emperor's overtures by saying that they did not think it quite usual 
 to enter into arrangements for the spoliation of a friendly Power, and that 
 England had no desire to succeed to any of the possessions of Turkey. 
 The Emperor doubtless did not believe these assurances. He probably 
 felt convinced that England had some game of her own in hand into which 
 she did not find it convenient to admit him on terms of partnership. He 
 must have felt bitterly annoyed at the thought tluit he had committed 
 himself so far for nothing. The communications were of course understood 
 to be strictly confidential ; and Nicholas had no fear that they would be 
 given to the public at, that time. They were in fact not made publicly 
 known for more than a year after. But Nicholas had the dissatisfaction 
 of knowing that her Majesty's ministers were now in possession of his 
 designs. He had the additional discomfort of believing that while he had 
 shown his hand to them, they had contrived to keep whatever designs of 
 their own they were preparing a complete secret from him. One unfor- 
 tunate admission, the significance of which will be seen hereafter, was 
 made on the part of the English Government during the correspondence 
 caused by the conversation between the Emperor arid Sir Hamilton Sey- 
 mour. It was Lord John Russell who, inadvertently, no doubt, made this 
 admission. In his letter to Sir Hamilton Seymour on February 9, 1853, 
 he wound up with the words, ' The more the Turkish Government adopts 
 the rules of impartial law and equal administration, the less will the 
 Emperor of Russia find it necessary to apply that exceptional protection 
 which his Imperial Majesty has found so burthensome and inconvenient, 
 though no doubt prescribed by duty and sanctioned by treaty.' 
 
 These conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour formed but an episode 
 in the history of the events that were then going on. It was an episode of 
 great importance, even to the immediate progress of the events, and it had 
 much to do with the turn they took towards war ; but there were great 
 forces moving towards antagonism in the South-East of Europe that must 
 in any case have come into collision. Russia, with her ambitions, her 
 tendency to enlarge her frontier on all sides, and her natural sympathies 
 of race and religion with the Christian and Sclave populations under 
 Turkish rule, must before long have come into active hostility with the 
 Porte. Even at the present somewhat critical time we are not under any 
 necessity to persuade ourselves that Russia was actuated in the movements
 
 c62 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XXT. 
 
 she made by merely selfish ambition, and nothing else; that all the wrong 
 was on her side of the quarrel, and all the right upon ours. It may be 
 conceded without any abrogation of patriotic English sentiment, that, in 
 standing up for the populations so closely affined to her in race and religion, 
 Russia was acting very much as England would have acted under similar 
 circumstances. If we can imagine a number of English and Christian 
 populations under the sway of some Asiatic despot on the frontiers of our 
 Indian empire, we shall admit that it is likely the sentiments of all English- 
 men in India would be extremely sensitive on their behalf, and that it 
 would not be difficult to get us to believe that we Avere called upon to 
 interfere for their protection. Certainly, anyone who should try to per- 
 suade us that, after all, these Englishmen were nearly as well off under the 
 Asiatic and despotic rule as many other people, or as they deserved to be, 
 would not have much chance of a patient hearing from us. 
 
 The Russian Emperor fell back a little after the failure of his efforts 
 with Sir Hamilton Seymour, and for a while seemed to agree with the 
 English Government as to the necessity of not embarrassing Turkey by 
 pressing too severely upon her. He was no doubt seriously disappointed 
 when he found that England would not go with him ; and his calculations 
 were put out by the discovery. He therefore saw himself compelled to 
 act with a certain moderation while feeling his way to some other mode of 
 attack. But the natural forces which were in operation did not depend on 
 the will of any empire or government for their tendency. Nicholas would 
 have had to move in any case. There is really no such thing in modern 
 politics as a genuine autocrat. Nicholas of Russia could no more afford to 
 overlook the evidences of popular and national feeling among his people 
 than an English sovereign could. He was a despot by virtue of the national 
 will which he embodied. The national will was in decided antagonism to 
 the tendencies of the Ottoman power in Europe; and afterwards to the 
 policy which the English Government felt themselves compelled to adopt 
 for the siipport of that power against the schemes of the Emperor of 
 Russia. 
 
 There had long been going on a dispute aboiit the Holy Places in 
 Palestine. The claims of the Greek Church and those of the Latin Church 
 were in antagonism there. The Emperor of Russia was the protector of 
 the Greek Church ; the Kings of France had long had the Latin Church 
 Tinder their protection. Prance had never taken our views as to the 
 necessity of maintaining the Ottoman power in Europe. On the contrary, 
 as we have seen, the policy of England and that of France were so decidedly 
 opposed at the time when France favoured the independence of Egypt, and 
 England woidd not hear of it, that the two countries very nearly came to war.
 
 853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 
 
 Nor did France really feel any very profound sympathy with the preten- 
 sions which the Latin monks were constantly making in regard to the 
 Holy Places. There was unquestionably downright religious fanaticism 
 on the part of Russia to back up the demands of the Greek Church ; but 
 we can hardly believe that opinion in France or in the cabinets of French 
 Ministers really concerned itself much about the Latin monks except in so 
 liir as political purposes might be subserved by paying some attention to 
 them. But it happened somewhat unfortunately that the French Govern- 
 ment began to be unusually active in pushing the Latin claims just then. 
 The whole dispute on which the fortunes of Europe seemed for a while to 
 depend was of a strangely mediaeval character. The Holy Places to which 
 the Latins raised a claim were the great Church in Bethlehem ; the Sanc- 
 tuary of the Nativity, with the right to place a new star there (that which 
 formerly ornamented it having been lost) ; the tomb of the Virgin ; the 
 Stone of Anointing ; the Seven Arches of the Virgin in the Church of the 
 Holy Sepulchre. In the reign of that remarkably pious, truthful, and 
 virtuous monarch, Francis the First of France, a treaty was made with 
 the Sultan by which France was acknowledged the protector of the Holy 
 Places in Palestine, and of the monks of the Latin Church who took on 
 themselves the care of the sacred monuments and memorials. But the 
 Greek Church afterwards obtained firmans from the Sultan ; each Sultan 
 gave away privileges very much as it pleased him, and without taking 
 much thought of the manner in which his firman might affect the treaties 
 of his predecessors; and the Greeks claimed on the strength of these con- 
 cessions that they had as good a right as the Latins to take care of the 
 Holy Places. Disputes were always arising, and of course these were 
 aggravated by the fact that France was supposed to be concerned in the 
 protection of one set of disputants and Russia in that of another. The 
 French and the Russian Governments did, in point of fact, interfere from 
 time to time for the purpose of making good their claims. The claims at 
 length came to be identified with the States which respectively protected 
 them. An advantage of the smallest kind gained by the Latins was viewed 
 as an insult to Russia ; a concession to the Greeks was a snub to France. 
 The stibject of controversy seemed trivial and odd in itself. But it had 
 even in itself a profounder significance than many a question of diplomatic 
 etiquette which has led great States to the verge of war, or into war itself. 
 Mr. Kinglake, whose brilliant history of the Invasion of the Crimea is too 
 often disfigured by passages of solemn and pompous monotony, has super- 
 fluously devoted several eloquent pages to prove that the sacredness of 
 association attaching to some particular spot has its roots in the very soil 
 of human nature. The custody of the Holy Places was in this instance
 
 364 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XXT. 
 
 a symbol of a religious inheritance to the monastic disputants, and of 
 political power to the diplomatists. 
 
 It was France which first stirred the controversy in the time just before 
 the Crimean War. The fact is beyond dispute. Lord John Russell had 
 hardly come into office when he had to observe in writing to Lord Cowley, 
 our ambassador in Paris, that ' her Majesty's Government cannot avoid 
 perceiving that the ambassador of France at Constantinople was the first to 
 disturb the status quo in which the matter rested.' ' Not,' Lord John 
 Russell went on to say, ' that the disputes of the Latin and Greek Churches 
 were not very active, but without some political action on the part of France 
 those quarrels would never have troubled the relations of friendly Powers.' 
 Lord John Russell also complained that the French ambassador was the 
 first to speak o having recourse to force and to threaten the intervention 
 of a French fleet. ' I regret to say,' the despatch contimied, ' that this evil 
 example has been partly followed by Russia.' The French Government 
 were indeed unusually active at that time. The French ambassador, M. de 
 Lavalette, is said to have threatened that a French fleet should appear off 
 Jaffa, and even hinted at a French occupation of Jerusalem, ' when,' as he 
 significantly put it, ' we should have all the sanctuaries.' One French 
 army occupying Rome and another occupying Jerusalem would have left 
 the world in no doubt as to the supremacy of France. The cause of all 
 this energy is not far to seek. The Prince President had only just suc- 
 ceeded in procuring himself to be installed as Emperor; and he was very 
 anxious to distract the attention of Frenchmen from domestic politics to 
 some showy and startling policy abroad. He was in quest of a policy of 
 adventure. This controversy between the Church of the East and the 
 Church of the West tempted him into activity, as one that seemed likely 
 enough to give him an opportunity of displaying the power of France 
 and of the new system without any very great danger or responsibility. 
 Technically, therefore, we are entitled to lay the blarne of disturbing the 
 peace of Europe in the first instance on the Emperor of the French. But 
 while we must condemn the restless and self-interested spirit which thus 
 set itself to stir up disturbance, we cannot help seeing that the quarrel 
 must have come at some time, even if the plebiscite had never been invited, 
 and a new Emperor had never been placed upon the throne of France. 
 The Emperor of Russia had made up his mind that the time had come tc 
 divide the property of the sick man, and he was not likely to remain long 
 without an opportunity of quarrelling with anyone who stood at the side 
 of the sick man's bed, and seemed to constitute himself a protector of the 
 sick man's interests. 
 
 The key of the whole controversy out of which the Eastern war arose
 
 1774-1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 365 
 
 and out of which indeed all subsequent complications in the Ea.st came as 
 well, was said to be found in a clause of the treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji. 
 During the negotiations for peace that took place in Vienna while the 
 Crimean War was yet going on, the assembled plenipotentiaries declared 
 that the whole dispute was owing to a misinterpretation of a clause in this 
 unfortunate treaty. In a time much nearer to our own, the discussion on 
 the same clause in the same treaty was renewed with all the old earnest- 
 ness ; and with the same difference of interpretation. It may not perhaps 
 give an initiated reader any very exalted opinion of the utility and beauty 
 of diplomatic arrangements, to hear that disputes covering more than a 
 century of time, and causing at least two great wars, arose out of the im- 
 possibility of reconciling two different interpretations of the meaning of 
 two or three lines of a treaty. The American civil war was said with 
 much justice to have been fought to obtain a definition of the limits of the 
 rights of the separate States as laid down in the constitution ; the Crimean 
 War was apparently fought to obtain a satisfactory and final definition of 
 the seventh clause of the Treaty of Kainardji ; and it did not fulfil its 
 purpose. The historic value therefore of this seventh clause may in one 
 sense be considered greater than that of the famous disputed words which 
 provoked the censure of the Jansenists and the immortal letters of Pascal. 
 The Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji was made in 1774, between the 
 Ottoman Porte and Catherine II. of Kussia. On sea and land the arms of 
 the Great Empress had been victorious. Turkey was beaten to her knees. 
 She had to give up Azof and Taganrog to Russia, and to declare the Crimea 
 independent of the Ottoman empire ; an event which it is almost needless 
 to say was followed not many years after by the Russians taking the 
 Crimea for themselves and making it a province of Catherine's empire. 
 The Treaty of Kainardji, as it is usually called, was that which made the 
 arrangements for peace. When it exacted from Turkey such heavy penalties 
 in the shape of cession of territory, it was hardly supposed that one seem- 
 ingly insignificant clause was destined to threaten the very existence of the 
 Turkish empire. The Treaty bore date July 10, 1774 ; and it was made, 
 BO to speak, in the tent of the victor. The seventh clause declared that the 
 Sublime Porte promised 'to protect constantly the Christian religion and its 
 churches ; and also to allow the minister of the Imperial Court of Russia to 
 make on all occasions representations as well in favour of the new church in 
 Constantinople, of which mention will be made in the fourteenth article, as in 
 favour of those who officiate therein, promising to take such representations 
 into due consideration as being made by a confidential functionary of a neigh- 
 bouring and sincerely friendly Power.' Not much possibility of misunder- 
 standing about these words, one might feel inclined to say. We tnxn then
 
 366 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxv. 
 
 to the fourteenth article alluded to, in order to discover if in its wording 
 lies the perplexity of meaning which led to such momentous and calamitous 
 results. We find that by this article it is simply permitted to the Court of 
 Russia to build a public church of the Greek rite in the Galata quarter of 
 Constantinople, in addition to the chapel built in the house of the minister ; 
 and it is declared that the new church ' shall be always under the protection 
 of the ministers of the (Russian) empire, and shielded from all obstruction 
 and all damage.' Here, then, we seem to have two clauses of the simplest 
 meaning and by no means of first-class importance. The latter clause 
 allows Russia to build a new church in Constantinople ; the former allows 
 the Russian minister to make representations to the Porte on behalf of the 
 church and of those who officiate in it. What difference of opinion, it may 
 be asked, could possibly arise ? The difference was this : Russia claimed 
 a right of protectorate over all the Christians of the Greek Church in 
 Turkey as the consequence of the seventh clause of the treaty. She 
 insisted that when Turkey gave her a right to interfere on behalf of the 
 worshippers in one particular church, the same right extended so far as to 
 cover all the worshippers of the same denomination in every part of the 
 Ottoman dominions. The great object of Russia throughout all the nego- 
 tiations that preceded the Crimean War was to obtain from the Porte an 
 admission of the existence of such a protectorate. Such an acknowledg- 
 ment would, in fact, have made the Emperor of Russia the patron and all 
 but the ruler of by far the larger proportion of the populations of European 
 Turkey. The Sultan would no longer have been master in his own 
 dominions. The Greek Christians would naturally have regarded the 
 Russian Emperor's right of intervention on their behalf as constituting a 
 protectorate far more powerful than the nominal rule of the Sultan. They 
 would have known that the ultimate decision of any dispute in which they 
 were concerned rested with the Emperor, and not with the Sultan ; and 
 they would soon have come to look upon the Emperor, and not the Sultan, 
 as their actual sovereign. 
 
 Now it does not seem likely on the face of things that any ruler of 
 a State would have consented to hand over to a more powerful foreign 
 monarch such a right over the great majority of his subjects. Still, if 
 Turkey, driven to her last defences, had no alternative but to make such a 
 concession, the Emperors of Russia could not be blamed for insisting that 
 it should be carried out. The terms of the article in the treaty itself 
 certainly do not seem to admit of such a construction. But for the views 
 always advocated by Mr. Gladstone, we should say it was self-evident 
 that the article never had any such meaning. We cannot, however, 
 dismiss the argument of such a man as Mr. Gladstone as if it were un-
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 367 
 
 worthy of consideration, or say that an interpretation is obviously erroneous 
 which he has deliberately and often declared to be accurate. We may as 
 woll mention here at once that Mr. Gladstone rests his argument on the 
 first line of the famous article. The promise of the Sultan, he contends, 
 to protect constantly the Christian religion and its churches is an engage 
 inent distinct in itself, and disconnected from the engagement that follows 
 in the same clause, and which refers to the new building and its minis- 
 trants. The Sultan engages to protect the Christian churches; and with 
 whom does he enter into this engagement? With the Sovereign of Russia. 
 Why does he make this engagement ? Because he has been defeated by 
 Russia and compelled to accept terms of peace ; and one of the conditions 
 on which he is admitted to peace is his making this engagement. How does 
 he make the engagement? By an article in a treaty agreed to between him 
 and the Sovereign of Russia. But if a State enters into treaty engagement 
 with another that it will do a certain thing, it is clear that the other State 
 must have a special right of remonstrance and of representation if the thing 
 be not done. Therefore Mr. Gladstone argues that as the Sultan made a 
 special treaty with Russia to protect the Christians, he gave in the very 
 nature of things a special right to Russia to complain if the protection was 
 not given. We are far from denying that there is force in the argument ; 
 and it is at all events worthy of being recorded for its mere historical 
 importance. But Mr. Gladstone's was certainly not the European inter- 
 pretation of the clause ; nor does it seem to us the interpretation that 
 history Avill accept. Lord John Russell, as AVC have seen, made a some- 
 what unlucky admission that the claims of Russia to a protectorate were 
 ' prescribed by duty and sanctioned by treaty.' But this admission seems 
 rather to have been the result of inadvertence or heedlessness than of any 
 deliberate intention to recognise the particular claim involved. The ad- 
 mission was afterwards made the occasion of many a severe attack upon 
 Lord John Russell by Mr. Disraeli and other leading members of the 
 Opposition. Assuredly Lord John Russell's admission, if it is really to be 
 regarded as such, was not endorsed by the English Government. When- 
 ever we find Russia putting the claim into plain Avords, we find England, 
 through her ministers, refusing to give it their acknoAvledgment. During 
 the discussions before the Crimean War, Lord Clarendon, our Foreign 
 Secretary, wrote to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe a letter embodying the 
 vieAVS of the English Government on the claim. No sovereign, Lord 
 Clarendon says, having a due regard for his own dignity and independence, 
 could admit proposals which conferred upon a foreign and more poAverful 
 sovereign a right of protection over his OAvn subjects. ' If such a concession 
 were made, the result,' as Lord Clarendon pointed out, ' would be that
 
 368 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. *xv. 
 
 fourteen millions of Greeks would henceforward regard the Emperor as 
 their supreme protector, and their allegiance to the Sultan would be little 
 more than nominal, while his own independence would dwindle into vas- 
 salage.' Diplomacy, therefore, was powerless to do good during all the 
 protracted negotiations that set in, for the plain reason that the only object 
 of the Emperor of Eussia in entering upon negotiation at all was one which 
 the other European Powers regarded as absolutely inadmissible. 
 
 The dispute about the Holy Places was easily settled. The Porte cared 
 very little about the matter, and was willing enough to come to any fair 
 terms by which the whole controversy could be got rid of. But the 
 demands of Russia went on just as before. Prince Mentschikoff, a man 
 of the Potemkin school, fierce, rough, and unable or unwilling to control 
 his temper, was sent with demands to Constantinople ; and his very manner 
 of making the demands seemed as if it were taken up for the purpose of 
 ensuring their rejection. If the envoy fairly represented the sovereign, 
 the demands must have been so conveyed with the deliberate intention of 
 immediately and irresistibly driving the Turks to reject every proposition 
 coming from such a negotiator. Mentschikoff brought his proposals with 
 him cut and dry in the form of a convention which he called upon Turkey 
 to accept without more ado. In other words, he put a pistol at Turkey's 
 head and told her to sign at once or else he would pull the trigger. 
 Turkey refused, and Prince Mentschikoff withdrew in real or affected 
 rage, and presently the Emperor Nicholas sent two divisions of his army 
 across the Pruth to take possession of the Danubian principalities. 
 
 Diplomacy, however, did not give in even then. The Emperor an- 
 nounced that he had occupied the Principalities not as an act of war, but 
 with the view of obtaining material guarantees for the concession of the 
 demands which Turkey had already declared that she would not concede. 
 The English Government advised the Porte not to treat the occupation as 
 an act of war, although fully admitting that it was strictly a casus belli, 
 and that Turkey would have been amply justified in meeting it by an 
 armed resistance if it were prudent for her to do so. It would of course 
 have been treated as war by any strong Power. We might well have 
 retorted upon Russia the harsh but not wholly unjustifiable language sho 
 had employed towards us when we seized possession of material guarantees 
 from the Greek Government in the harbour of Piraeus. In our act, how- 
 ever, there was less of that which constitutes war than in the arbitrary 
 conduct of Russia. Greece did not declare that our demands were such as 
 she could not admit in principle. She did admit most of them in principle; 
 but was only, as it seemed to our Government, or at least to Lord Palmer- 
 Bton, trying to evade an actual settlement. There was nothing to go to 
 war about; and our seizure of the ships, objectionable us it was, might be
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 369 
 
 described as only a way of getting hold of a material guarantee for the 
 discharge of a debt which was not in principle disputed. But in the dis- 
 pute between Russia and Turkey the claim was rejected altogether; it waa 
 declared intolerable ; its principle was absolutely repudiated, and any 
 overt act on the part of Russia must therefore have had for its object to 
 compel Turkey to submit to a demand which she would yield to force 
 alone. This is of course in the very spirit of Avar ; and if Turkey had 
 been a stronger Power, she would never have dreamed of meeting it in 
 any other way than by an armed resistance. She was, however, strongly 
 advised by England and other Powers to adopt a moderate course ; and, in 
 fact, throughout the whole of the negotiations she showed a remarkable 
 self-control and a dignified courtesy which must some-times have been very 
 vexing to her opponent. Diplomacy went to work again, and a Vienna 
 note was concocted which Russia at once ottered to accept. The four great 
 Powers who were carrying on the business of mediation were at first quite 
 charmed with the note, with the readiness of Russia to accept it, and with 
 themselves ; and but for the interposition of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe it 
 seems highly probable that it would have been agreed to by all the partie? 
 concerned. Lord Stratford, however, saw plainly that the note was a virtual 
 concession to Russia of all that she specially desired to have, and all that 
 Europe was unwilling to concede to her. The great object of Russia was 
 to obtain an acknowledgment, however vague or covert, of her protectorate 
 over the Christians of the Greek Church in the Sultan's dominions; and 
 the Vienna note was so constructed as to affirm much rather than *o deny 
 the claim which Russia had so long been setting up. Assuredly such a 
 note could at some future time have been brought out in triumph by 
 Russia as an overwhelming evidence of the European recognition of such 
 a protectorate. 
 
 Let us make this a little more plain. Suppose the question at issue 
 were as to the payment of a tribute, claimed by one prince from another. 
 The one had been always insisting that the other was his vassal, bound to 
 pay him tribute ; the other always repudiated the claim in principle. 
 This was the subject of dispute. After a while the question is left to 
 arbitration, and the arbitrators, without actually declaring in so many 
 words that the claim to the tribute is established, yet go so far as to direct 
 the payment of a certain sum of money, and do not introduce a single word 
 to show that in their opinion the original claim was unjust in principle. 
 Would not the claimant of the tribute be fully entitled in after years, if 
 any new doubt of his claim were raised, to appeal to this arbitration as 
 confirming it 1 Would he not be entitled to say, ' The dispute was about 
 my right to tribute. Here is a document awarding to me the payment of 
 
 VOL. I. B B
 
 370 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxv. 
 
 a certain sum, and not containing a word to show that the arbitrators 
 disputed the principle of my claim. Is it possible to construe that other- 
 wise than as a recognition of my ilaim ? ' We certainly cannot think it 
 would have been otherwise regarded by any impartial mind. The very 
 readiness with which Russia consented to accept the Vienna note ought to 
 have taught its framers that Russia found all her account in its vague and 
 ambiguous language. The Prince Consort said it was a trap laid by 
 Russia through Austria ; and it seems hardly possible to regard it now in 
 :iny other light. 
 
 The Turkish Government, therefore, acting under the advice of Lord 
 Stratford de Redcliffe, our ambassador to Constantinople, who had returned 
 to his post after a long absence, declined to accept the Vienna note unless 
 with considerable modifications. Lord Stratford de RedclifTe showed great 
 acuteness and force of character throughout all these negotiations. A 
 reader of Mr. Kinglake's history is sometimes apt to become nauseated by 
 the absurd pompousness with which the historian overlays his descriptions 
 of ' the great Eltchi,' as he is pleased to call him, and is inclined to wish 
 that the great Eltchi could have imparted some of his own sober gravity 
 and severe simplicity of style to his adulator. Mr. Kinglake writes of 
 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe as if he were describing the all-compelling 
 movements of some divinity or providence. A devoted imperial historian 
 would have made himself ridiculous by writing of the Great Napoleon at 
 the height of his power in language of such inflated mysticism as this 
 educated Englishman has allowed himself to employ when describing the 
 manner in which our ambassador to Constantinople did his duty during 
 the days before the Crimean War. But the extraordinary errors of taste 
 and good sense into which Mr. Kinglake occasionally descends cannot 
 prevent us from doing justice to the keen judgment and the inflexible will 
 which Lord Stratford displayed during this critical time. He saw the 
 fatal defect of the note, which, prepared in Paris, had been brought to its 
 supposed perfection at Vienna, and had there received the adhesion of the 
 English Government along with that of the governments of the other great 
 Powers engaged in the conference. A hint, from Lord Stratford made the 
 Ministers of the Porte consider it with suspicious scrutiny, and they too 
 saw its weakness and its conscious or unconscious treachery. They de- 
 clared that unless certain modifications were introduced they would not, 
 accept the note. The reader will at first think perhaps that some of these 
 modifications were mere splittings of hairs and diplomatic, worse even than 
 lawyer-like, quibbles. But in truth the alterations demanded were of the 
 greatest importance for Turkey. The Porte had to think, not of the 
 immediate purpose of the note, but of the objects it might be made to 
 serve afterwards. It contained, for instance, words which declared that
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 371 
 
 the Government of his Majesty the Sultan would remain ' faithful to the 
 letter and the spirit of the stipulations of the Treaties of Kainardji and of 
 Adrianople, relative to the protection of the Christian religion.' These 
 words, in a note drawn up for the purpose of satisfying the Emperor of 
 Russia, could not but be understood as recognising the interpretation of 
 the Treaty of Kainardji on which Russia has always insisted. The Porte 
 therefore proposed to strike out these words and substitute the following : 
 'To the stipulations of the Treaty of: Kainardji, confirmed by that of 
 Adrianople, relative to the protection by the Sublime Porte of the Chris- 
 tian religion.' By these words the Turkish ministers quietly affirm that 
 the only protectorate exercised over the Christians of Turkey is that of 
 the Sultan of Turkey himself. The difference is simply that between a 
 claim conceded and a claim repudiated. The Russian Government refused 
 to accept the modifications; and in arguing against them, the Russian 
 minister, Count Nesselrode, made it clear to the English Government that 
 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was right when he held the note to be full of 
 weakness and of error. For the Russian minister argued against the modi- 
 fications on the very ground that they denied to the claims of Russia just 
 that satisfaction that the statesmanship and the public opinion of Europe 
 had always agreed to refuse. The Prince Consort's expression was appro- 
 priate : the Western Powers had nearly been caught in a trap. 
 
 From that time all hopes of peace were over. There were, to be sure, 
 other negotiations still. A ghastly semblance of faith in the possibility of 
 a peaceful arrangement was kept up for a while on both sides. Little 
 plans of adjustment were tinkered up and tried, and fell to pieces the 
 moment they were tried. It is not necessary for us to describe them. 
 Not many persons put any faith or even professed any interest in them. 
 They were conducted amid the most energetic preparations for war on 
 both sides. Our troops were moving towards Malta ; the streets of Lon- 
 don, of Liverpool, of Southampton, and other towns, were ringing with the 
 cheers of enthusiastic crowds gathered together to watch the marching of 
 troops destined for the East. Turkey had actually declared war against 
 Russia. People now were anxious rather to see how the war would open 
 between Russia and the allies than when it would open ; the time when 
 could evidently only be a question of a few days; the way how was a 
 matter of more peculiar interest. We had known so littlf of war f;>r 
 nearly forty years, that added to all the other emotions which the coming 
 of battle must bring was the mere feeling of curiosity as to the sensation 
 produced by a state of war. It was an abstraction to the living genera- 
 tion a thing to read of and discuss and make poetry and romance out of 
 but they could not yet realise what itself was like. 
 
 1! B 2
 
 372 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvi. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 
 
 MEANTIME where was Lord Palmerston ? He of all men, one would think, 
 must have been pleased with the turn things were taking. He had had 
 Erom the beginning little faith in any issue of the negotiations but war. 
 Probably he did not really wish for any other result. We are well in- 
 clined to agree with Mr. Kinglake that of all the members of the Cabinet 
 he alone clearly saw his way and was satisfied with the prospect. But 
 according to the supposed nature of his office he had now nothing to do 
 with the war or with foreign affairs except as every member of the Cabinet 
 shares the responsibilities of the whole body. He had apparently about 
 as much to do with the war as the Postmaster- General, or the Chancellor 
 for the Duchy of Lancaster, might have. He had accepted the office of 
 Home Secretary ; he had declared that he did not choose to be Foreign 
 Secretary any more. He affirmed that he wanted to learn something about 
 home affairs, and to get to understand his countrymen ; and so forth. He 
 was really very busy all this time in his new duties. Lord Palmerston 
 was a remarkably efficient and successful Home Secretary. His unceasing 
 activity loved to show itself in whatever department he might be called 
 iipon to occupy. He brought to the somewhat prosaic duties of his new 
 office, not only all the virile energy, but also all the enterprise which he 
 had formerly shown in managing revolutions and dictating to foreign 
 courts. The ticket-of-leave system dates from the time of his adminis- 
 tration. Our transportation system had broken down, for, in fact, the 
 colonies would stand it no longer, and it fell to Lord Palmerston to find 
 something to put in its place ; and the plan of granting tickets-of-leave to 
 convicts who had shown that they were capable of regeneration was the 
 outcome of the necessity and of his administration. The measures to abate 
 the smoke nuisance, by compelling factories under penalties to consume 
 their own smoke, is also the offspring of Palmerston's activity in the Home 
 Office. The Factory Acts were extended by him. He; went energetically 
 to work in the shutting up of graveyards in the metropolis; and in a letter 
 to his brother he declared that he should like to ' put down beershops, and 
 let shopkeepers sell beer like oil, and vinegar, and treacle, to be carried 
 home and drunk with wives and children.' 
 
 This little project is worthy of notice because it illustrates more fairly 
 perhaps than some far greater plan might do at once the strength and the 
 weakness of Palrnerston's intelligence. He could not see why everything
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 373 
 
 should not bo done in a. plain straightforward way, and why the- arrange- 
 ments that were good for the sale of one tiling might not bo good al.so for 
 the sale of another. He did not stop to inquire whether, as a matter of 
 fact, beer is a commodity at all like oil, and vinegar, and treacle ; whether 
 the same consequences follow the drinking oL' beer and the consumption of 
 treacle. II is critics said that lie was apt to manage his foreign attains on 
 the same rough-and-ready principle, if a system suited England, Avhy 
 should it not suit all other places as well ? If treacle may be sold safely 
 without any manner of authoritative regulation, why not beer? The 
 answer to the latter question is plain because treacle is not beer. So, 
 people said, with Palmerston's constitutional projects ibr every place. 
 Why should not that which suits England suit also Spain ? Because, to 
 begin with, a good many people urged, Spain is not England. 
 
 There was one department of his duties in which Palmerston was acquir- 
 ing a new and somewhat odd reputation. That was in his way of answering 
 deputations and letters. ' The mere routine business of the Home Office," 
 Palmerston writes to his brother, 'as far as that consists in daily corre- 
 spondence, is far lighter than that of the Foreign Office. But during 
 a session of Parliament the whole time of the Secretary of State, up 
 to the time when he must go to the House of Commons, is taken 
 up by deputations of all kinds, and interviews with members of Par- 
 liament, militia colonels, etc.' Lord Palmerstou was always civil and 
 cordial ; he was full of a peculiar kind of fresh common sense, and always 
 ready to apply it to any subject whatever. He could at any time say 
 some racy thing Avhich set the public wondering and laughing. lie gave 
 something like a shock to the Presbytery of Edinburgh when they wrote to 
 him through the Moderator to ask whether a national fast ought not to be 
 appointed in consequence of the appearance of cholera. Lord Palmerston 
 gravely admonished the Presbytery that the Maker of the universe had ap- 
 pointed certain laws of nature for the planet on which AVC live, and that the 
 weal or woe of mankind depends on the observance of those laws, one of 
 them connecting health ' with the absence of those noxious exhalations 
 which proceed from overcrowded human beings, or irom decomposing 
 substances whether animal or vegetable.' lie therefore recommended that 
 the purification of towns and cities should be more strenuously carried on, 
 and remarked that the causes and sources of contagion, if allowed to 
 remain, ' will infallibly breed pestilence and be fruitful in death, in spite 
 of all the prayers and fastings of a united but inactive nation.' When 
 Lord Stanley of Alderley applied to Lord Palmerston for a special per- 
 mission for a deceased dignitary of a church to be buried under the roof 
 of the sacrtd building, the Home Secretary declined to accede to the
 
 374 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. XXTI. 
 
 request in a letter that might have come from, or might have delighted, 
 Sydney Smith. ' What special connection is there between church dig- 
 nities and the privilege of being decomposed under the feet of survivors ? 
 Do you seriously mean to imply that a soul is more likely to go to 
 heaven because the body which it inhabited lies decomposing under the 
 pavement of a church instead of being placed in a churchyard ? . . . 
 England is, I believe, the only country in which in these days people 
 accumulate putrefying dead bodies amid the dwellings of the living; and 
 as to burying bodies under thronged churches, you might as well put 
 them under libraries, drawing-rooms, and dining-rooms.' 
 
 Lord Pahnerston did not see what a very large field of religious and 
 philosophical controversy he opened up by some of his arguments, 
 both as to the fasting and as to the burial in churchyards. He only saw, 
 for the moment, what appeared to him the healthy common-sense aspect of 
 the position he had taken up, and did not think or care about what other 
 positions he might be surrendering by the very act. He had not a poetic 
 or philosophic mind. In clearing his intelligence from all that he would 
 have called prejudice or superstition, he had cleared out also much of the 
 deeper sympathetic faculty which enables one man to understand the 
 feelings and get at the springs of conduct in the breasts of other men. 
 No one can doubt that his jaunty way of treating grave and disputed subjects 
 offended many pure arid simple minds. Yet it was a mistake to suppose 
 that mere levity dictated his way of dealing with the prejudices of others. 
 He had often given the question his deepest attention, and had come to a 
 conclusion with as much thought as his temperament would have allowed 
 to any subject. The difference between him and graver men was that 
 when he had come to a conclusion seriously, he loved to express his views 
 humorously. He resembled in this respect some of the greatest and the 
 most earnest men of his time. Count Cavour delighted in jocose and 
 humorous answers ; so did President Lincoln ; so at one period of his 
 public career did Prince Bismarck. But there can be no doubt that Pal- 
 merston often made enemies by his seeming levity when another man 
 could easily have made friends by saying just the same thing in grave 
 words. The majority of the House of Commons liked him because he 
 amused them and made them laugh ; and they thought no more of the 
 matter. 
 
 But the war is now fairly launched ; and Palmerston is to all appear- 
 ance what would be vulgarly called ' out of the swim.' Every eye was 
 turned to him. He was like Pitt standing up on one of the back benches 
 to support the administration of Addington. For years he had been iden- 
 tified with the Foreign Office, and with that sort of foreign policy which
 
 1868. A HISTORY OF OUIt OWN TIMhS. 37.5 
 
 would seem best suited to the atmosphere of war ; and now war is on 
 loot, and Pal iner.ston is in the Home Ofliee pleasantly 'chaffing' militia 
 colonels and making sensitive theologians angry by the flippancy of his 
 replies. Perhaps there was something flattering to PalmersUm's feeling of 
 self-love in the curious wonder with which people turned their eyes upon 
 him during all tlu;t interval. Everyone seemed to ask how the country 
 was to get on without him or to manage its foreign affairs, and when he 
 would be good enough to come down from his quiet seat in the Home 
 Office and assume what seemed his natural duties. A famous tenor singer 
 of our day once had some quarrel with his manager. The singer with- 
 drew from the company ; someone else had to be put in his place. On 
 the first night when the new man made his appearance before the public, 
 the great singer was seen in a box calmly watching the performance like 
 any other of the audience. The new man turned out a failure. The eyes 
 of the house began to fix themselv es upon the one who could sing, but 
 who was sitting as unconcernedly in his box as if he never meant to sing 
 any more. The audience at first was incredulous. It was in a great pro- 
 vincial city where the singer had always been a prime favourite. They 
 could not believe that they Avere in good faith to be expected to put up 
 with bad singing while he was there. At last their patience gave way. 
 They insisted on the one singer leaving his place on the stage, and the 
 other coming down from his box and his easy attitude of unconcern, and 
 resuming what they regarded as his proper part. They would have their 
 way ; they carried their point ; and the man Avho could sing was com- 
 pelled at last to return to the scene of his old triumphs and sing for them 
 again. The attitude of Lord Palmerston and the manner in which the 
 public eyes were turned upon him during the early days of the war could 
 hardly be illustrated more effectively than by this story. As yet the only 
 wonder was why he did not take somehow the directorship of affairs ; the 
 time was to come when the general voice would insist upon his doing so. 
 
 One day a startling report ran through all circles. It was given out 
 that Palmerston had actually resigned. So far was he from any intention 
 of taking on himself the direction of affairs even of war or of foreign 
 affairs that he appeared to have gone out of the Ministry altogether. 
 The report was confirmed : Palmerston actually had resigned. It was at 
 once asserted that his resignation was caused by difference of opinion 
 between him and his colleagues on the Eastern policy of the Government. 
 But, on the other hand, it was as stoutly affirmed that the difference of 
 opinion had only to do with the new Reform Bill which Lord John 
 Russell was preparing to introduce. Now it is certain that Lord Palmer- 
 ston did differ in opinion with Lord John Russell on the subject of his
 
 376 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvi. 
 
 Reform Bill. It is certain that this was the avowed cause, and the only 
 avowed cause of Palmerston's resignation. But it is equally certain that 
 the real cause of the resignation was the conviction in Palmerston's mind 
 that his colleagues were not up to the demands of the -crisis in regard to 
 the Eastern war. Lord Palmerston's letters to his brother on the subject 
 are amusing. They resemble some of the epistles which used to pass 
 between suspected lovers in old days, and in which the words were so 
 arranged that the sentences conveyed an obvious meaning good enough for 
 the eye of jealous authority, but had a very different tale to tell to the one 
 being for whom the truth was intended. Lord Palmerston gives his brother 
 a long and circumstantial account of the differences about the Reform Bill, 
 and about the impossibility of a Home Secretary either supporting by speech 
 a Bill he did not like or sitting silent during the whole discussion on it in the 
 House of Commons. He shows that he could not possibly do otherwise 
 under such trying circumstances than resign. The whole letter, until we 
 come to the very last paragraph, is about the Reform Bill and nothing 
 else. One might suppose that nothing else whatever was entering into the 
 writer's thoughts. But at the end Palmerston just remembers to add that 
 the Times was telling 'an untruth' when it said there had been no difference 
 in the Cabinet about Eastern affairs; for in fact there had been some little 
 lack of agreement on the subject, but it would have looked rather silly, 
 Palmerston thinks, if he were to have gone out of office merely because 
 he could riot have his own way about Turkish affairs. Exactly ; and in a 
 few days after Palmerston was induced to withdraw his resignation and to 
 remain in the Government ; and then he wrote to his brother again ex- 
 plaining how and all about it. He explains that several members of the 
 Cabinet told him they considered the details of the Reform Bill quite open 
 to discussion and so forth. ' Their earnest representations, and the know- 
 ledge that the Cabinet had on Thursday taken a decision on Turkish affairs 
 in entire accordance with opinions which I had long unsuccessfully pressed 
 upon them, decided me to withdraw my resignation, which I did yester- 
 day.' ' Of course,' Lord Palmerston quietly adds, ' what I say to you 
 about the Cabinet decision on Turkish affairs is entirely for yourself and 
 not to be mentioned to anybody. But it is very important, and will give 
 the allied squadrons the command of the Black Sea.' All this was very 
 prudent, of course, and very prettily arranged. But we doubt whether a 
 single man in England who cared anything about the whole question was 
 imposed upon for one moment. Nobody believed that at such a time 
 Lord Palmerston would have gone out of office because he did not quite 
 like the details of a Reform Bill, or that the Cabinet would have ob- 
 stinately clung to such a scheme just then in spite of his opposition.
 
 18&3. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMK.S. 37? 
 
 Indeed the first impression of everyone was that Palmerston had gone out 
 only in order to conic back again much stronger than before; that lie 
 resigned when he could not have his way in Eastern affairs, and that he 
 would resume ofh'ee empowered to have his way in everything. Thi 
 explanations about the Reform Bill found as impatient listeners among 
 the public at large as the desperate attempts of the young heroine in 
 ' She Stoops to Conquer' to satisfy honest Tony Lumpkin with her hasty 
 and ill- concocted devices about Shagbag and Green and the rest of them, 
 whose story she pretends to read for him from the letter which is not 
 intended to reach the suspicious cars of his mother. When Lord Pal- 
 merston resumed his place in the Ministry, the public at large felt certain 
 that the war spirit was now at last to have its way, and that the dallying.-: 
 of the peace-lovers were over. 
 
 Nor was England long left to guess at the reason why Lord Palmer- 
 ston had so suddenly resigned his office and so suddenly returned to it. 
 A great disaster had fallen upon Turkey. Her fleet had been destroyed 
 by the Russians at Sinope, in the Black Sea. Sinope is, or was, a con- 
 siderable seaport town and naval station belonging to Turkey, and stand- 
 ing on a rocky promontory on the southern shore of the Black Sea. On 
 November 30, 1853, the Turkish squadron was lying there at anchor. 
 The squadron consisted of seven frigates, a sloop, and a steamer. It had 
 no ship of the line. The Russian fleet, consisting of six ships of the line 
 and some steamers, had been cruising about the Black Sea for several 
 days previously, issuing from Sebastopol, and making an occasional swoop 
 now and then as if to bear down upon the Turkish squadron. The Turk- 
 ish commander was quite aware of the danger, and pressed for reinforce- 
 ments ; but nothing was done, either by the Turkish Government or by 
 the ambassadors of the allies at Constantinople. On November 30, how- 
 ever, the Sebastopol fleet did actually bear down upon the Turkish vessels 
 lying at Sinope. The Turks, seeing that an attack was coming at last, 
 not only accepted, but even anticipated it ; for they were the first to fire. 
 The fight was hopeless for them. They fought with all the desperate 
 energy of fearless and unconquerable men ; unconquerable, at least, in 
 the sense that they would not yield. But the oddsAvere too much against 
 them to give them any chance. Either they woiild not haul down their 
 flag, which is very likely ; or if they did strike their colours, the Russian 
 admiral did not see the signal. The fight went on until the whole Turk- 
 ish squadron, save tor the steamer, was destroyed. It was asserted on 
 official authority that moie than four thousand Turks were killed; that 
 the survivors hardly numbered four hundred ; and that of these every 
 man was wounded. Sinope itself was much shattered and battered by
 
 378 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxvi. 
 
 the Russian fleet. The affair was at once the destruction o the Turkish 
 ships and an attack upon Turkish territory. 
 
 This was ' the massacre of Sinope.' When the news came to England 
 there arose one cry of grief and anger and shame. It was regarded as a 
 deliberate act of treachery, consummated amid conditions of the most 
 hideous barbarity. A clamour arose against the Emperor of Russia as if 
 he were a monster outside the pale of civilised law, like some of the lurious 
 and treacherous despots of mediaeval Asiatic history. Mr. Ivinglake lias 
 shown and indeed the sequence of events must in time have shown every- 
 one that there was no foundation for these accusations. The attack was 
 not treacherous, but openly made ; not sudden, but clearly announced by 
 previous acts, and long expected, as we have seen, by the Turkish com- 
 mander himself ; and it was not in breach even of the courtesies of war. 
 Russia and Turkey were not only formally but actually at war. The 
 Turks were the first to begin the actual military operations. More than 
 five weeks before the affair at Sinope they had opened the business by 
 firing from a fortress on a Russian flotilla. A few days after this act 
 they crossed the Danube at Widdin and occupied Kalafat ; and for several 
 days they had fought under Omar Pasha with brilliant success against the 
 Russians at Oltenitza. All England had been enthusiastic about the 
 bravery which the Turks had shown at Oltenitza and the success which 
 had attended their first encounter with the enemy. It was hardly to be 
 expected that the Emperor of Russia would only fight when he was at a 
 disadvantage and refrain from attack where his power was overwhelming. 
 Still there was an impression among English and French statesmen that 
 while negotiations for peace were actually going on between the Western 
 Powers and Russia, and Avhile the fleets of England and France were re- 
 maining peacefully at anchor in the Bosphorus, whither they had been 
 summoned by this time, the Russian Emperor would abstain from com- 
 plicating matters by making use of his Sebastopol fleet. Nothing could 
 have been more unwise than to act upon an impression of this kind as if 
 it were a regular agreement. But the English public did not understand 
 at that moment the actual condition of things, and may well have supposed 
 that if our Government seemed secure and content, there must have been 
 some definite arrangement to create so happy a condition of mind. It 
 may look strange to readers now, surveying this chapter of past history 
 with cool, unimpassioned mind, that anybody could have believed in the 
 existence of any arrangement by virtue of which Turkey could be at war 
 with Russia and not at war with her at the same time ; which would have 
 allowed Turkey to strike her enemy when and how she pleased, and would 
 have restricted the enemy to such time, place, and method of retort as
 
 1853. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 379 
 
 might suit the convenience of the neutral Powers. But at the time, when 
 the true state of affairs was little known in England, the account of the 
 'massacre of Sinope' was received as if it had been the tale of some un- 
 paralleled act of treachery and savagery ; and the eagerness of the 
 country lor war against Russia became inflamed to actual passion. 
 
 It was at that moment that Pahnerston resigned his office. The Cabi- 
 net were still not prepared to go as far as he would have gone. They had 
 believed that the Sebastopol fleet would do nothing as long as the Western 
 Powers kept talking about peace; they now believed perhaps that the 
 Emperor of Russia would say lie was very sorry for what had been done 
 and promise not to do so any more. Lord Palmerston, supported by the 
 urgent pressure of the Emperor of the French, succeeded, however, in at 
 last overcoming their determination. It was agreed that some decisive 
 announcement should be made to the Emperor of Russia on the part of 
 England and France ; and Lord Palmerston resumed his place, master of 
 the situation. This was the decision of which he had spoken in his letter 
 to his brother; the decision which lie said he had long unsuccessfully 
 pressed upon his colleagues, and which would give the allied squadrons 
 the command of the Black Sea. It was, in fact, an intimation to Russia 
 that France and England were resolved to prevent any repetition of the 
 Sinope affair ; that their squadrons would enter the Black Sea with orders 
 to request, and if necessary to constrain, every Russian ship met in the 
 Euxine to return to Sebastopol ; and to repel by force any act of aggres 
 sion afterwards attempted against the Ottoman territory or flag. This 
 was not, it should be observed, simply an intimation to the Emperor of 
 Russia that the great Powers would impose and enforce the neutrality of 
 the Black Sea. It was an announcement that if the flag of Russia dared 
 to show itself on that sea, which washed Russia's southern shores, the 
 war-ships of two far foreign States, taking possession of those waters, 
 would pull it down, or compel those who bore it to fly ignominiously into 
 port. This was, in fact, war. 
 
 Of course Lord Palmerston knew this. Because it meant war he 
 accepted it and returned to his place, well pleased with the way in which 
 things were going. From his point of view he was perfectly right. He 
 had been consistent all through. He believed from the first that the pre- 
 tensions of Russia would have to be put down by force of arms, and 
 could not be put down in any other Avay ; he believed that the danger to 
 England from the aggrandisement of Russia was a capital danger calling 
 for any extent of national sacrifice to avert it. He believed that a war 
 with Russia was inevitable, and he preferred taking it sooner to taking it 
 later. He believed that an alliance with the Emperor of the French was
 
 380 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvi. 
 
 desirable, and a war with Russia would be the best means of making this 
 effective. Lord Paliuerston, therefore, was determined not to remain in 
 the Cabinet unless some strenuous measures were taken, and now, as on a 
 memorable former occasion, he understood better than anyone else the 
 prevailing temper of the English people. 
 
 When the resolution of the Western Cabinets was communicated to 
 the Emperor of Russia he withdrew his representatives from London and 
 Paris. On February 21, 1854, the diplomatic relations between Russia 
 and the two allied Powers were brought to a stop. Six weeks before 
 this the English and French fleets had entered the Black Sea. The 
 interval was filled up with renewed efforts to bring about a peaceful 
 arrangement, which were conducted with as much gravity as if anyone 
 believed in the possibility of their success. The Emperor of the French, 
 who always loved letter-writing, and delighted in what Cobden once 
 happily called the 'monumental style,' wrote to the Russian Emperor 
 appealing to him, professedly in the interests of peace, to allow an armis- 
 tice to be signed, to let the belligerent forces on both sides retire from the 
 places to which motives of war had led them, and then to negotiate a 
 convention with the Sultan which might be submitted to a conference of 
 the four Powers. If Russia would not do this, then Louis Napoleon, un- 
 dertaking to speak in the name of the Queen of Great Britain as well as 
 of himself, intimated that France and England would be compelled to 
 leave to the chances of war what might now be decided by reason and 
 justice. The Emperor Nicholas replied that he had claimed nothing but 
 what was confirmed by treaties ; that his conditions were perfectly well- 
 known ; that he was still willing to treat on these conditions ; but if 
 Russia were driven to arms, then he quietly observed that he had no 
 doubt she could hold her own as well in 1854 as she had done in 1812. 
 That year, 1812, it is hardly necessary to say, was the year of the burn- 
 ing of Moscow and the disastrous retreat of the French. We can easily 
 understand what faith in the possibility of a peaceful arrangement the 
 Russian Emperor must have had when he made the allusion and the 
 French Emperor must have had when it met his eye. Of course if 
 Louis Napoleon had had the faintest belief in any good result to come of 
 his letter he would never have closed it with the threat which provoked 
 the Russian sovereign into his insufferable rejoinder. The correspondence 
 might remind one of that which is said to have passed between two Irish 
 chieftains. ' Pay me my tribute,' wrote the one, ' or else ! ' 'I owe you 
 no tribute,' replied the other, ' and if . . .' 
 
 England's ultimatum to Russia was despatched on February 27, 1854. 
 It was conveyed in a letter from Lord Clarendon to Count Nesselrode. It
 
 1854. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 381 
 
 declared that the British Government had exhausted all the eflbrts of ne- 
 gotiation, and was compelled to announce that ' if Russia should decline to 
 restrict within purely diplomatic limits the discussion in which she has for 
 some time past been engaged with the Sublime Porte, and does not, by 
 return of the messenger who is the bearer of my present letter, announce 
 her intention of causing the Russian troops under Prince Gortschakoff to 
 commence their march with a view to recross the Pruth, rfo that the pro- 
 vinces of Moldavia and Wallachia shall be completely evacuated on April 
 30 next, the British Government must consider the refusal or the silence 
 o the Cabinet of St. Petersburg as equivalent to a declaration of war and 
 will take its measures accordingly.' It is not perhaps very profitable work 
 for the historian to criticise the mere terms of a document announcing a 
 course of action which long before its issue had become inevitable. But 
 it is worth while remarking perhaps that it would have been better and 
 more dignified to confine the letter to the simple demand for the evacua- 
 tion of the Danubian provinces. To ask Russia to promise that her con- 
 troversy with the Porte should be thenceforward restricted within purely 
 diplomatic limits was to make a demand with which no great Power would, 
 or indeed could, undertake to comply. A member of the Peace Society 
 itself might well hesitate to give a promise that a dispute in which he was 
 engaged .should be for ever confined within purely diplomatic limits. In 
 any case it was certain that Russia would not now make any concessions 
 tending towards peace. The messenger who was the bearer of the letter 
 was ordered not to wait more than six days for an answer. On the fifth 
 day the messenger was informed by word of mouth from Count Ne.sselrode 
 that the Emperor did not think it be.cxmimg in him to give any reply to 
 the letter. The die was cast. Rather, truly, the fact was recorded that 
 the die had been cast. A few days after a crowd assembled in front of 
 the Royal Exchange to watch the performance of a ceremonial that had 
 been little known to the living generation. The Sergeant-at-Arms, ac- 
 companied by some of the officials of the City, read from the steps of the 
 Royal Exchange her Majesty's declaration of war against Russia. 
 
 The causes of the declaration of war were set forth in an official state- 
 ment published in the London Gazette. This document is an interesting 
 and a valuable State paper. It recites with clearness and deliberation the 
 successive steps by which the allied Powers had been led to the necessity 
 of an armed intervention in the controversy between Turkey and Russia. 
 It described, in the first place, the complaint of the Emperor of Russia 
 against the Sultan with reference to the claims of the Greek and Latin 
 Churches, and the arrangement promoted satisfactorily by her Majesty's 
 ambassador at Constantinople for rendering justice to the claim, 'an ar-
 
 382 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES CH. xxvi. 
 
 rangement to which no exception was taken by the Russian Government.' 
 Then came the sudden unmasking of the other and quite different claims 
 of Prince Mentschikoff, ' the nature of which in the first instance he en- 
 deavoured, as far as possible, to conceal from her Majesty's ambassador.' 
 These claims, ' thus studiously concealed,' affected not merely, or at all, the 
 privileges of the Greek Church at Jerusalem, ' but the position of many 
 millions of Turkish subjects in. their relations to their sovereign the 
 Sultan.' The declaration recalled the various attempts that were made by 
 the Queen's Government in conjunction with the Governments of France, 
 Austria, and Prussia, to meet any just demands of the Russian Emperor 
 without affecting the dignity and independence of the Sultan ; and showed 
 that if the object of Russia had been solely to secure their proper privi- 
 leges and immunities for the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire, 
 the offers that were made could not have failed to meet that object. Her 
 Majesty's Government, therefore, held it as manifest that what Russia was 
 really seeking was not the happiness of the Christian communities of 
 Turkey, but the right to interfere in the ordinary relations between 
 Turkish subjects and their sovereign. The Sultan refused to consent to 
 this, and declared war in self-defence. Yet the Government of Her 
 Majesty did not renounce all hope of restoring peace between the contend- 
 ing parties until, advice and remonstrance proving wholly in vain, and 
 Russia continuing to extend her military preparations, her Majesty felt 
 called upon, ' by regard for an ally, the integrity and independence of 
 whose Empire have been recognised as essential to the peace of Europe ; 
 by the sympathies of her people with right against wrong ; by a desire to 
 avert from her dominions most injurious consequences, and to save 
 Europe from the preponderance of a Power which has violated the faith 
 of treaties and defies the opinion of the civilised world, to take up arms 
 in conjunction with the Emperor of the French for the defence of the 
 Sultan. 1 
 
 Some passages of this declaration have invited criticism from English 
 historians. It opens, for example, with a statement of the fact that the 
 efforts for an arrangement were made by her Majesty in conjunction with 
 France, Austria and Prussia. It speaks of this concert of the four Powers 
 down almost to the very close ; and then it siiddenly breaks off and an- 
 nounces, that, in consequence of all that has happened, her Majesty has 
 felt compelled to take up arms ' in conjunction with the Emperor of the 
 French.' What strange diplomatic mismanagement, it was asked, has led 
 to this singular non sequitur ? Why, after having carried on the negotia- 
 tions through all their various stages with three other great Powers, all of 
 them supposed to be eqiially interested in a settlement of the question, is
 
 1R54. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 383 
 
 England at the last moment compelled to take up arms with only one of 
 those Powers as an ally ? 
 
 The principal reason for the separation of the two Western Powers of 
 Europe from the other great States was found in the condition of Prussia. 
 Prussia was then greatly under the influence of the Russian court. The 
 Prussian sovereign was related to the Emperor of Russia; and his kingdom 
 was almost overshadowed by Russian influence. Prussia had come to 
 occupy a lower position in Europe than she had ever before held during 
 her existence as a kingdom. It seemed almost marvellous how by any 
 process the country of the Great Frederick could have sunk to such a 
 condition of insignificance. She had been compelled to stcop to Austria 
 after the events of 1848. The King of Prussia, tampering with the offers 
 of the strong national party who desired to make him Emperor of Germany, 
 now moving forward and now drawing back, 'letting I dare not wait upon 
 I would,' was suddenly pulled up by Austria. The famous arrangement, 
 called afterwards ' the humiliation of Olmu'ta,' and so completely revenged 
 at Sadowa, compelled him to drop all his triflings with nationalism and 
 repudiate his former instigators. The King of Prussia was a highly-cul- 
 tured, amiable literary man. He loved letters and art in a sort of di/lc- 
 tante way ; he had good impulses and a weak nature ; he was a dreamer; 
 a sort of philosopher manque. He was unable to makeup his mind to any 
 momentous decision until the time for rendering it effective had gone by. 
 A man naturally truthful, he was often led by very weakness into acts that 
 seemed irreconcilable with his previous promises and engagements. He 
 could say witty and sarcastic things, and when political affairs went wrong 
 with him, he could console himself with one or two sharp sayings only 
 heard by those immediately around him ; and then the world might go its 
 way for him. He was, like Rob Roy, ' ower good for banning and ower 
 bad for blessing.' Like our own Charles II., he never said a foolish thing 
 and never did a wise one. He ought to have been an aesthetic essayist, or 
 a lecturer on art and moral philosophy to young ladies ; and an unkind 
 destiny had made him the king of a State specially embarrassed in a most 
 troublous time. So unkindly was popular rumour as well as fate to him, 
 that he got the credit in foreign countries of being a stupid sensualist, 
 when he was really a man of respectable habits and refined nature ; and 
 in England at least the nickname ' King Clicquot ' was long the brand by 
 which the popular and most mistaken impression of his character was 
 signified. 
 
 The King of Prussia was the elder brother of the present German 
 Emperor. Had the latter been then on the throne he would probably 
 have taken some timely and energetic decision with regard to the national
 
 384 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvi. 
 
 duty cf Prussia during the impending crisis, Right or wrong, he would 
 doubtless have contrived to see his way and make up his mind at an early 
 stage of the European movement. It is by no means to be assumed that 
 he would have taken the course most satisfactory to England and France : 
 but it is likely that his action might have prevented the war, either by 
 rsndering the allied Powers far too strong to be resisted by Russia, or by 
 adding to Russia an influence which would have rendered the game of war 
 too formidable to suit the calculations of the Emperor of the French. The 
 actual King of Prussia, however, went so far with the allies as to lead 
 them for a while to believe that he was going all the way ; but at the last 
 moment he broke off, declared that the interests of Prussia did not require 
 or allow him to engage in a war, and left France and England to walk 
 their own road. Austria could not venture upon such a war without the 
 co-operation of Prussia ; and indeed the course which the campaign took 
 seemed likely to give both Austria and Prussia a good excuse for assuming 
 that their interests were not closely engaged in the struggle. Austria 
 would most certainly have gone to war if the Emperor of Russia had kept 
 up the occupation of the Danubian Principalities and for that purpose 
 her territorial situation made her irresistible. But when the seat of war 
 was transferred to the Black Sea, and when after a while the Oar with- 
 drew his troops from the Principalities and Austria occupied them by 
 virtue of a convention with the Sultan, her direct interest in the struggle 
 was reduced almost to nothing. Austria and Prussia were in fact solicited 
 by both sides of the dispute, and at one time it was even thought possible 
 that Prussia might give her aid to Russia. This, however, she refrained 
 from doing ; Austria and Prussia made an arrangement between themselves 
 for mutual defence in case the progress of the war should directly imperil 
 the interests of either ; and England and France undertook in alliance the 
 task of chastising the presumption and restraining the ambitious designs of 
 Russia. Mr. Kinglake finds much fault with the policy of the English 
 Government, on which he lays all the blame of the severance of interests 
 between the two Western States and the other two great Powers. But we 
 confess that we do not see how any course within the reach of England 
 could have secured just then the thorough alliance of Prussia; and with- 
 out such an alliance it would have been vain to expect that Austria would 
 throw herself unreservedly into the policy of the Western Powers. It 
 must be remembered that the controversy between Russia and the West 
 really involved several distinct questions, in some of which Prussia had 
 absolutely no direct interest and Austria very little. Let us set out some 
 of these questions separately. There was the Russian occupation of the 
 Principalities. In this Austria frankly acknowledged her capital interest.
 
 1864. A HISTORY OF OUIi OWN TIMES. 385 
 
 Its direct bearing was on her more than any other Power. It concerned 
 Prussia as it did England and France, inasmuch as it was an evidence of 
 an aggressive purpose which might very seriously threaten the general 
 stability of the institutions of Europe ; but Prussia had no closer interest 
 in it. Austria was the State most affected by it, and Austria was the 
 State which could with most effect operate against it, and was always 
 willing and resolute if needs were to do so. Then there was the question 
 of Russia's claim to exercise a protectorate over the Christian populations 
 of Turkey. This concerned England and France in one sense as part of 
 the general pretensions of Russia, and concerned each of them separately 
 in another sense. To France it told of a rivalry with the right she 
 claimed to look after the interests of the Latin Church ; to England it 
 spoke of a purpose to obtain a hold over populations nominally subject to 
 the Sultan which might in time make Russia virtual master of the ap- 
 proaches to our Eastern possessions. Austria too had a direct interest in 
 repelling these pretensions of Russia, for some of the populations they re- 
 ferred to were on her very frontier. But Prussia can hardly be said to 
 have had any direct national interest in that question at all. Then there 
 came, distinct from all these, the question of the Straits of the Dardanelles 
 and the Bosphorus. 
 
 This question of the Straits, which has so much to do with the whole 
 European aspect of the war, is not to be understood except by those who 
 bear the conformation of the map of Europe constantly in their minds. 
 The only outlet of Russia on the southern side is the Black Sea. The 
 Black Sea is, save for one little outlet at its south-western extremity, a 
 huge land-locked lake. That little outlet is the narrow channel called the 
 Bosphorus. Russia and Turkey between them surround the whole of 
 the Black Sea with their territory. Russia has the north and some of the 
 eastern shore ; Turkey has all the southern, the Asia Minor shore, and 
 nearly all the western shore. Close the Straits of the Bosphorus and 
 Russia would be literally locked into the Black Sea. The Bosphorus is a 
 narrow channel, as has been said ; it is some seventeen miles in length, 
 and in some places it is hardly more than half a mile in breadth. But it 
 is very deep all through, so that ships of war can float close up to its very 
 shores on either side. This channel in its course passes between the city 
 of Constantinople and its Asiatic suburb of Scutari. The Bosphorus 
 then opens into the little Sea of Marmora ; and out of the Sea cf Mar- 
 mora the way westward is through the channel of the Dardanelles. The 
 Dardanelles form the only passage into the Archipelago, and thence into 
 the Mediterranean. The channel of the Dardanelles is, like the Bosphorus, 
 very narrow and very deep, but it pursues its course for some forty miles. 
 
 VOL. I. f f.
 
 386 A HISTOEY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. xxvi 
 
 Any one who holds a map in his hand will see at once how Turkey and 
 Russia alike are affected by the existence of the Straits on either extre- 
 mity of the Sea of Marmora. Close up these Straits against vessels oi 
 war, and the capital of the Sultan is absolutely unassailable from the sea. 
 Close them, on the other hand, and the Russian fleet in the Black Sea is 
 absolutely cut off from the Mediterranean and the Western World. But 
 then it has to be remembered that the same act of closing would secure 
 the Russian ports and shores on the Black Sea from the approach of any 
 of the great navies of the West. The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus 
 being alike such narrow channels, and being edged alike by Turkish 
 territory, were not regarded as high seas. The Sultans always claimed the 
 right to exclude foreign ships of war from both the Straits. The Treaty 
 of 1841 secured this right to Turkey by the agreement of the five great 
 Powers of Europe. The treaty acknowledged that the Porte had the right 
 to shut the Straits against the armed navies of any foreign Power ; and 
 the Sultan, for his part, engaged not to allow any such navy to enter either 
 of the Straits in time of peace. The closing of the Straits had been the 
 subject of a perfect succession of treaties. The Treaty of 1809 between 
 Great Britain and Turkey confirmed by engagement ' the ancient rule of 
 the Ottoman empire ' forbidding vessels of war at all times to enter the 
 ' Canal of Constantinople.' The Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi between 
 Russia and Turkey, arising out of Russia's co-operation with the Porte to 
 put down the rebellious movement of Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian vassal 
 of the latter, contained a secret clause binding the Porte to close ' the 
 Dardanelles' against all war vessels whatever, thus shutting Russia's 
 enemies out of the Black Sea, but leaving Russia free to pass the Bos- 
 phorus, so far at least, as that treaty engagement was concerned. Later, 
 when the great Powers of Europe combined to put down the attempts of 
 Egypt, the Treaty of July 13, 1841, made in London, engaged that in 
 time of peace no foreign ships of war should be admitted into the Straits 
 of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. This treaty was but a renewal 
 of a convention made the year before, while France was still sulking 
 away from the European concert and did nothing more than record her 
 return to it. 
 
 As matters stood then, the Sultan was not only permitted but was 
 bound to close the Straits in times of peace, and no navy might enter 
 them without his consent even in times of war. But in times of war he 
 might of course give the permission and invite the presence and co-opera- 
 tion of the armed vessels of a foreign Power in the Sea of Marmora. B} 
 this treaty the Black Sea fleet of Russia became literally a Black Sea fleet, 
 and could no more reach the Mediterranean and Western Europe than a
 
 1854. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 387 
 
 boat on the Lake of Lucerne could do. Naturally Russia chafed at this ; 
 hut at the same time she was not willing to see the restriction withdrawn 
 in favour of an arrangement that would leave the Straits, and consequently 
 the Black Sea, open to the navies of France and England. Her supre- 
 macy in Eastern Europe would count for little, her power of coercing 
 Turkey would be sadly diminished, if the war-flag of England, for example:, 
 were to float side by side with her own in front of Constantinople or in the 
 Etixine. Therefore it was natural that the ambition of Russia should tend 
 towards the ultimate possession of Constantinople and the Straits for her- 
 self ; but as this was an ambition the fulfilment of which seemed far off 
 and beset with vast dangers, her object, meanwhile, was to gain as mucli 
 influence and ascendency as possible over the Ottoman Government- to 
 make it practically the vassal of Russia, and in any case to prevent any 
 other great Power from obtaining the influence and ascendency which she 
 coveted for herself. Now the tendency of this ambition and of all the 
 intermediate claims and disputes with regard to the opening or closing of 
 the Straits was of importance to Europe generally as a part of Russian 
 aggrandisement ; but of the great Powers they concerned England most ; 
 France as a Mediterranean and a naval power ; Austria only in a third 
 and remoter degree ; and Prussia at the time of King Frederick William 
 least of all. It is not surprising therefore that the two Western Powers 
 were not able to carry their accord with Prussia to the extent of an alliance 
 in war against Russia ; and it was hardly possible then for Austria to go 
 on if Prussia insisted on drawing back. Thus it came that at a certain 
 point of the negotiations Prussia fell off absolutely, or nearly so ; Austria 
 undertook but a conditional co-operation, of which, as it happened, the 
 conditions did not arise ; and the Queen of England announced that she 
 had taken up arms against Russia ' in conjunction with the Emperor of 
 the French.' 
 
 To the great majority of the English people this war was popular. It 
 was popular, partly because of the natural and inevitable reaction against 
 the doctrines of peace and mere trading prosperity which had been 
 preached somewhat too pertinaciously for some time before. But it was 
 popular too because of its novelty. It was like a return to the youth of 
 the world when England found herself once more preparing for the field. 
 It was like the pouring of new blood into old veins. The public had 
 grown impatient of the common saying of foreign capitals, that England 
 had joined the Peace Society and would never be seen in battle any more. 
 Mr. Kinglake is right when he says that the doctrines of the Peace Society 
 had never taken any hold of the higher classes in this country at all. 
 They had never, we may venture to add, taken any real hold of the 
 
 c c 2
 
 388 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. cii. xxn. 
 
 humbler classes; of the working men, for example. The well-educated 
 thoughtful middle-class, who knew how much of worldly happiness depends 
 on a regular income, moderate taxation, and a comfortable home, supplied 
 most of the advocates of ' peace,' as it was scornfully said, ' at any price.' 
 Let us say, injustice to a very noble and very futile doctrine, that there 
 were no persons in England who advocated peace ' at any price,' in the 
 ignominious sense which hostile critics pressed upon the words. There 
 was a small, a serious and a very respectable body of persons who, out of 
 the purest motives of conscience, held that all war was criminal and offen- 
 sive to the Deity. They were for peace at any price, exactly as they were 
 for truth at any price, or conscience at any price. They were opposed to 
 war as they were to falsehood or to impiety. It seemed as natural to 
 thorn that a man should die unresisting rather than resist and kill, as it 
 does to most persons who profess any sentiment of religion, or even of 
 honour, that a man should die rather than abjure the faith he believes in, 
 or tell a lie. It is assumed as a matter of course that any Englishman 
 worthy of the name would have died by any torture tyranny could put on 
 him rather than perform the old ceremony of trampling on the crucifix 
 which certain heathen States were said to have sometimes insisted on as 
 the price of a captive's freedom. To the believers in the peace doctrine 
 the act of war was a trampling on the crucifix, which brought with it evil 
 consequences unspeakably worse than the mere performance of a profane 
 ceremonial. To declare that they would rather suffer any earthly penalty 
 of defeat or national servitude than take part in a war was only consistent 
 with the great creed of their lives. It ought not to have been held as any 
 reproach to them. Even those who, like this writer, have no personal 
 sympathy with such a belief, and who hold that a war in a just cause is 
 an honour to a nation, may still recognise the purity and nobleness of the 
 principle which inspired the votaries of peace and do honour to it. But 
 these men were in any case not many at the time when the Crimean War 
 broke out. They had very little influence on the course of the national 
 policy. They were assailed with a flippant and a somewhat ignoble 
 ridicule. The worst reproach that could be given to men like Mr. Cobden 
 and Mr. Bright was to accuse them of being members of the Peace Society. 
 It does not appear that either man was a member of the actual organisa- 
 tion. Mr. Bright's religious creed made him necessarily a votary of 
 peace ; Mr. Cobden had attended meetings called with the futile purpose 
 of establishing peace among nations by the operation of good feeling and 
 of common sense. But for a considerable time the temper of the English 
 people was such as to render any talk about peace not only unprofitable, 
 but perilous to the very cause of peace itself. Some of the leading mem-
 
 1864. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 38S 
 
 bera of the Peace Society did actually get up a deputation to the Emperor 
 Nicholas to appeal to his better feelings ; and of course they were charmed 
 by the manners of the Emperor, who made it his business to be in a very 
 gracious humour, and spoke them fair, and introduced them in the most 
 unceremonious way to his wife. Such a visit counted for nothing in 
 Russia, and at home it only tended to make people angry and impatient, 
 and to put the cause of peace in greater jeopardy than ever. Viewed as 
 a practical influence the peace doctrine has completely broken down, as a 
 general resolution against the making of money might have done during 
 the time of the mania for speculation in railway shares. But it did not 
 merely break down of itself. It carried some great influences down with 
 it for the time influences that were not a part of itself. The eloquence 
 that had coerced the intellect and reasoning power of Peel into a complete 
 surrender to the doctrines of Free Trade, the eloquence that had aroused 
 the populations of all the cities of England and had conquered the House 
 of Commons, was destined now to call aloud to solitude. Mr. Cobden and 
 Mr. Bright addressed their constituents and their countrymen in vain. 
 The fact that they were believed to be opposed on principle to all wars 
 put them out of court in public estimation, as Mr. Kinglake justly 
 observes, when they went about to argue against this particular war. 
 
 In the Cabinet itself there were men who disliked the idea of a war 
 quite as much as they did. Lord Aberdeen detested war, and thought it 
 BO absurd a way of settling national disputes, that almost until the first 
 cannon-shot had been fired he could not bring himself to believe in the 
 possibility of the intelligent English people being drawn into it. Mr. Glad- 
 stone had a conscientious and a sensitive objection to war in general as a 
 brutal and an unchristian occupation, although his feelings would not have 
 carried him so far away as to prevent his recognition of the fact that war 
 might often be a just, a necessary and a glorious undertaking on the part 
 of a civilised nation. The difficulties of the hour were considerably en- 
 hanced by the differences of opinion that prevailed in the Cabinet. 
 
 There were other differences there as well as those that belonged to the 
 mere abstract question of the glory or the guilt of war. It soon became 
 clear that two parties of the Cabinet looked on the war and its objects with 
 different eyes and interests. Lord Palmerston wanted simply to put down 
 Russia and uphold Turkey. Others were specially concerned for the 
 Christian populations of Turkey and their better government. Lord 
 Palmerston not merely thought that the interests of England called for 
 some check to the aggressiveness of Russia ; he liked the Turk for himself ; 
 he had faith in the future of Turkey : he went so far even as to proclaim 
 his belief in the endurance of her military power. Uive Turkey single-
 
 390 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CK. xxvi. 
 
 handed a fair chance, he argued, and she would beat Russia. He did not 
 believe either in the disaffection of the Christian populations or in the 
 stories of their oppression. He regarded all these stories as part of the 
 plans and inventions of Eussia. He had no half-beliefs in the matter at 
 all. The Christian populations and their grievances he regarded, in plain 
 language, as mere humbugs; he looked upon the Turk as a very fine 
 fellow whom all chivalric minds ought to respect. He believed all that 
 was said upon the one side, and nothing upon the other ; he had made up 
 his mind to this long ago, and no arguments or facts could now shake his 
 convictions. A belief of this kind may have been very un philosophic. It 
 was undoubtedly in many respects the birth of mere prejudice independent 
 of fact or reasoning. But the temper born of such a belief is exactly that 
 which should have the making of a war entrusted to it. Lord Palmerston 
 saw his way straight before him. The brave Turk had to be supported ; 
 the wicked Russian had to be put down. On one side there were Lord 
 Aberdeen, who did not believe anyone seriously meant to be so barbarous 
 as to go to war, and Mr. Gladstone, who shrank from war in general and 
 was not yet quite certain whether England had any right to undertake this 
 war ; the two being furthermore concerned far more for the welfare of 
 Turkey's Christian subjects than for the stability of Turkey or the humilia- 
 tion of Russia. On the other side was Lord Palmerston, gay, resolute, 
 clear as to his own purpose, convinced to the heart's core of everything 
 which just then it was for the advantage of his cause to believe. It was 
 impossible to doubt on which side were to be found the materials for the 
 successful conduct of the enterprise which was now so popular with the 
 country. The most conscientious men might differ about the prudence or 
 the moral propriety of the war; but to those who once accepted its neces- 
 sity and wished our side to win, there could be no possible doubt, even for 
 members of the Peace Society, as to the importance of having Lord Palmer- 
 ston either at the head of affairs or in charge of the war itself. The moment 
 the war actually broke out, it became evident to everyone that Pal merston's 
 interval of comparative inaction and obscurity was well nigh over. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE INVASION OF TI1K CRIMEA. 
 
 ENGLAND then and France entered the war as allies. Lord Raglan, formerly 
 Lord Fitzroy Somerset, an old pupil of the Great Duke in the Peninsular 
 War, and who had lost his right arm serving under Wellington at Waterloo,
 
 '854. A HISTOHY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 391 
 
 was appointed to command the English forces. Marshal St. Arnaud, a hold, 
 brilliant soldier of fortune, was entrusted by the Emperor of the French 
 with the leadership of the soldiers of France. The allied forces went out 
 to the East and assembled at Varna, on the Black Sea shore, from which they 
 were to make their descent on the Crimea. The war, meantime, had gone 
 badly for the Emperor of Russia in his attempt to crush the Turks. The 
 Turks had found iji Omar Pasha a commander of remarkable ability and 
 energy; and they had in one or two instances received the unexpected aid and 
 counsel of clever and successful Englishmen. A singularly brilliant episode 
 in the opening part of the war was the defence of the earthworks of Silistria, 
 on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube, by a body of Turkish troops under 
 the directions of three young Englishmen ; Captain Butler, of the Ceylon 
 Rifles, Lieut. Nasmyth, of the East India Company's Service, and Lieut. 
 J. A. Ballard, of the Bombay Engineers. These young soldiers had volun- 
 tarily undertaken the danger and responsibility of the defence. Butler was 
 killed, but the Russians were completely foiled and had to raise the siege. 
 At Giurgevo and other places the Russians were likewise repulsed ; and 
 the invasion of the Danubian provinces was already, to all intents, a failure. 
 
 Mr. Kinglake and other writers have argued that but for the ambition of 
 the Emperor of the French and the excited temper of the English people the 
 war might well have ended then and there. The Emperor of Russia had 
 found, it is contended, that he could not maintain an invasion of European 
 Turkey ; his fleet was confined to its ports in the Black Sea, and there was 
 nothing for him but to make peace. But we confess we do not see with 
 what propriety or wisdom the allies, having entered on the enterprise at all, 
 could have abandoned it at such a moment and allowed the Czar to 
 escape thus merely scotched. However brilliant and gratifying the suc- 
 cesses obtained against the Russians, they were but a series of what might 
 be called outpost actions. They could not be supposed to have tested the 
 resources of Russia or weakened her strength. They had humbled and 
 vexed her just enough to make her doubly resentful and no more. It 
 seems impossible to suppose that such trivial disasters could have affected 
 in the slightest degree the historic march of Russian ambition, supposing 
 such a movement to exist. If we allow the purpose with which England 
 entered the war to be just and reasonable, then Ave think the instinct of 
 the English ceople was sound and true which would have refused to allow 
 Russia to get off with one or two trifling checks, and to nurse her wrath 
 and keep her vengeance waiting for a better chance some other time. The 
 allies went on. They sailed from Varna for the Crimea nearly three months 
 after the raising of the siege of Silistria. 
 
 There is much discussion as to the original author of the project for the
 
 392 A HISTOEY OF OUP OWN TIMES. CH. xxvn. 
 
 invasion of the Crimea. Thr. Emperor Napoleon has had it ascribed to him ; 
 so has Lord Palmerston ; so has the Duke of Newcastle ; so, according to 
 Mr. Kinglake, has the Times newspaper. It does not much concern us to 
 know in whom the idea originated, but it is of some importance to know 
 that it was essentially a civilian's and not a soldier's idea. It took posses- 
 sion almost simultaneously, so far as we can observe, of the minds of 
 several statesmen, and it had a sudden fascination for the public. The 
 Emperor Nicholas had raised and sheltered his Black Sea fleet at Sebastopol. 
 That fleet had sallied forth from Sebastopol to commit what was called the 
 massacre of Sinope. Sebastopol was the .great iirsenal of Russia. It was 
 the point from which Turkey was threatened ; from which, it was univer- 
 sally believed, the embodied ambition of Russia was one day to make its 
 most formidable effort of aggression. Within the fence of its vast sea-forts 
 the fleet of the Black Sea lay screened. From the moment when the 
 vessels of England and France entered the Euxine, the Russian fleet had 
 withdrawn behind the curtain of these defences, and was seen upon the 
 open waves no more. If, therefore, Sebastopol could be taken or destroyed, 
 it would seem as if the whole material fabric, put together at such cost and 
 labour, for the execution of the schemes of Russia would be shattered at a 
 blow. There seemed a dramatic justice in the idea. It could not fail to 
 commend itself to the popular mind. 
 
 Mr. Kinglake has given the world an amusing picture of the manner 
 in which the despatch of the Duke of Newcastle, ordering the invasion of 
 the Crimea for it really amounted to an order was read to his colleagues 
 in the Cabinet. It was a despatch of the utmost importance, for the terms 
 in which it pressed the project on Lord Raglan really rendered it almost 
 impossible for the Commander-in- Chief to use his own discretion. It ought 
 to have been considered sentence by sentence, word by word. It wa? 
 read, Mr. Kinglake affirms, to a number of Cabinet Ministers most ol 
 whom had fallen fast asleep. The day was warm, he says; the despatch 
 was long ; the reading was somewhat monotonous. Most of those who 
 tried to listen found the soporific influence irresistible. As Sam Weller 
 would have said, poppies were nothing to it. The statesmen fell asleep ; 
 and there was no alteration made in the despatch. All this is very amus- 
 ing ; and it is, we believe, true enough that at the particular meeting to 
 which Mr. Kinglake refers there was a good deal of nodding of sleepy 
 heads and closing of tired eyelids. But it is not fair to say that these 
 slumbers had anything to do with the subsequent events of the war. The 
 reading of the despatch was purely a piece of formality ; for the project it 
 was to recommend had been discussed very fully before, and the minds of 
 most members of the Cabinet were finally made up. The 28th of June,
 
 1864. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMRS. 393 
 
 1854, was the day of the slumbering Cabinet. But Lord Palmerston had 
 during the whole of the previous fortnight at least been urging on the 
 Cabinet, and on individual members of it separately, the Duke of New- 
 castle in especial, the project of an invasion of the Crimea and an attempt 
 on Sebastopol. With all the energy and strenuousness of his nature he 
 had been urging this, by arguments in the Cabinet, by written memoranda 
 for the consideration of each member of the Cabinet separately, and by 
 long earnest letters addressed to particular members of the Cabinet. Many 
 of these documents, of the existence of which Mr. Kinglake was doubtless 
 not aware when lie set down his vivacious and satirical account of the 
 sleeping Cabinet, have since been published. The plan had also been 
 greatly favoured and much urged by the Emperor of the French before 
 the day of the sleep of the statesmen ; indeed, as has been said already, he 
 receives from many persons the credit of having originated it. The plan, 
 therefore, good or bad, was thoroughly known to the Cabinet, and had 
 been argued for and against over and over again before the Duke of New- 
 castle read aloud to drowsy ears the despatch recommending it to the 
 Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in the field. The perusal of the 
 despatch was a mere form. It would indeed have been better if the most 
 wearied statesman had contrived to pay a full attention to it, but the want 
 of such respect in no wise affected the policy of the country. It is a pity 
 to have to spoil so amusing a story as Mr. Kinglake's ; but the common- 
 place truth has to be told that the invasion of the Crimea was not due to 
 the crotchet of one minister and the drowsiness of all the rest. 
 
 The invasion of the Crimea, however, was not a soldier's project. It 
 was not welcomed by the English or the French commander. It was 
 undertaken by Lord Raglan out of deference to the recommendations of 
 the Government; and by Marshal St. Arnaud out of deference to the 
 Emperor of the French and because Lord Eaglan too did not see his way 
 to decline the responsibility of it. The allied forces were therefore con- 
 veyed to the south-western shore of the Crimea, and effected a landing in 
 Kalamita Bay, a short distance north of the point at which the river Alma 
 runs into the sea. Sebastopol itself lies about thirty miles to the south ; 
 and then more southward still, divided by the bulk of a jutting promontory 
 from Sebastopol, is the harbour of Balaklava. The disembarkation began 
 on the morning of September 14, 1854. It was completed on the fifth day ; 
 and there were then some 27,000 English, 30,000 French, and 7,000 
 Turks, landed on the shores of Catherine the Great's Crimea. The landing 
 was effected without any opposition from the Russians. On September 19 
 the allies marched out of their encampments and moved southward in the 
 direction of Sebastopol. They had a skirmish or two with a reconnoitring
 
 394 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvn 
 
 force of Russian cavalry and Cossacks ; but they had no business ol 
 genuine war until they reached the nearer bank of the Alma. The 
 Russians in great strength had taken up a splendid position on the heights 
 that fringed the other side of the river. The allied forces reached the 
 Alma about noon on September 20. They found that they had to cross 
 the river in the face of the Russian batteries armed with heavy guns on 
 the highest point of the hills or bluffs, of scattered artillery, and of dense 
 masses of infantry which covered the hills. The Russians were under the 
 command of Prince Mentschikoff. It is certain that Prince Mentschikoff 
 believed his position unassailable, and was convinced that his enemies 
 were delivered into his hands when he saw the allies approach and attempt 
 to effect the crossing of the river. He had allowed them, of deliberate 
 purpose, to approach thus far. He might have attacked them on their 
 landing, or on their two days' march towards towards the river. But he 
 did not choose to do anything of the kind. He had carefully sought out 
 a strong and what he considered an impregnable position. He had found 
 it, as he believed, on the south bank of the Alma ; and there he was 
 simply biding his time. His idea was that he could hold his ground for 
 some days against the allies with ease ; that he would keep them there, 
 play with them, until the great reinforcements he was expecting could 
 come to him ; and then he would suddenly take the offensive and crush 
 the enemy. He proposed to make of the Alma and its banks the grave of 
 the invaders. But with characteristic arrogance and lack of care he had 
 neglected some of the very precautions which were essentially necessary to 
 secure any position, however strong. He had not taken the pains to make 
 himself certain that every easy access to his position was closed against the 
 attack of the enemy. The attack was made with desperate courage on 
 the part of the allies, but without any great skill of leadership or tenacity 
 of discipline. It was rather a pell-mell sort of fight, in which the head- 
 long courage and the indomitable obstinacy of the English and French 
 troops carried all before them at last. A study of the battle is of little 
 profit to the ordinary reader. It was an heroic scramble. There was 
 little coherence of action between the allied forces. But there was happily 
 an almost total absence of generalship on the part of the Russians. The 
 soldiers of the Czar fought stoutly and stubbornly as they have always 
 done ; but they could not stand up against the blended vehemence and 
 obstinacy of the English and French. The river was crossed, the opposite 
 heights were mounted, Prince Mentschikoff 's great redoubt was carried, 
 the Russians were driven from the field, the allies occupied their ground ; 
 the victory was to the Western Powers. Indeed, it would not be unfair to 
 say that the victory was to the English ; owing to whatever cause, the
 
 1854. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 395 
 
 French did not take that share in the heat of the battle which their 
 strength and their military genius might have led men to expect. St. 
 Arnaud, their commandcr-in -chief, w;is in wretched health, on the point of 
 death, in fact ; he was in no condition to guide the battle ; a brilliant 
 enterprise of General Bosquet was ill-supported and had nearly proved a 
 failure ; and Prince Napoleon's division got hopelessly jammed up and 
 confused. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that in the confusion and 
 scramble of the whole affair we were more lucky than the French. If a 
 number of men are rushing headlong and in the dark towards some distant 
 point, one may run against an unthought-of obstacle and fall down and so 
 lose his chance, while his comrade happens to meet with no such stum- 
 bling-block and goes right on. Perhaps this illustration may not unfairly 
 distribute the parts taken in the battle. It would be superfluous to say 
 that the French fought splendidly where they had any real chance of 
 fighting. But the luck of the day was not with them. On all sides the 
 battle was fought without generalship. On all sides the bravery of the 
 officers and men was worthy of any general. Our men were the luckiest. 
 They saw the heights ; they saw the enemy there ; they made for him ; 
 they got at him ; they would not go back ; and so he had to give way. 
 That was the history of the day. The big scramble was all over in a few 
 hours. The first field was fought, and we had won. 
 
 The Russians ought to have been pursued. They them selves fully expected 
 a pursuit. They retreated in something like utter confusion, eager to put 
 the Katcha river, which runs south of the Alma and with a somewhat 
 similar course, between them and the imaginary pursuers. Had they been 
 followed to the Katcha they might have been all made prisoners or 
 destroyed. But there was no pursuit. Lord Raglan was eager to follow up 
 the victory ; but the French had as yet hardly any cavalry, and Marshal St. 
 Arnaud would not agree to any further enterprise that day. Lord Raglan 
 believed that he ought not to persist ; and nothing was done. The Russians 
 were unable at first to believe in their good fortune. It seemed to them for 
 a long time impossible that any commanders in the world could have failed, 
 under conditions so tempting, to follow a flying and disordered enemy. 
 
 Except for the bravery of those who fought, the battle was not much 
 to boast of. The allies together considerably outnumbered the Russians, 
 although, from the causes we have mentioned, the Englishmen were left 
 throughout the greater part of the day to encounter an enemy numerically 
 superior, posted on difficult and commanding heights. But it was the first 
 great battle which for nearly forty years our soldiers had fought with a 
 civilised enemy. The military authorities and the country were well dis- 
 posed to make the most of it. At this distance of time it is almost touching
 
 396 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxrn. 
 
 to read some of the heroic contemporaneous description! of the great 
 scramble of the Alma. It might almost seem as if, in the imaginings of 
 the enthusiastic historians, Englishmen had never mounted heights and 
 defeated superior numbers before. The sublime triumphs against every 
 adverse condition which had been won by the genius of a Maryborough or 
 a Wellington could not have been celebrated in language of more exalted 
 dithyrambic pomp. The gallant medley on the banks of the Alma and 
 the fruitless interval of inaction that followed it were told of as if men 
 were speaking of some battle of the gods. 
 
 Very soon, however, a different note came to be sounded. The cam- 
 paign had been opened under conditions differing from those of most cam- 
 paigns that went before it. Science had added many new discoveries to 
 the art of war. Literature had added one remarkable contribution of her 
 own to the conditions amid which campaigns were to be carried on. She 
 had added the ' special correspondent.' The old-fashioned historiographer 
 of wars travelled to please sovereigns and minister to the self-conceit of 
 conquerors. The modern special correspondent had a very different pur- 
 pose. He watched the movements of armies and criticised the policy of 
 generals in the interest of some journal, which for its part was concerned 
 only for the information of the public. No favour that courts or monarchs 
 could bestow was worthy a moment's consideration in the mind even of 
 the most selfish proprietor of a newspaper when compared with the reward 
 which the public could give to him and to his paper for quick and accurate 
 news and trustworthy comment. The business of the special correspondent 
 has grown so much since the Crimean War that we are now inclined to 
 look back upon the war correspondents of those days almost as men then 
 did upon the old-fashioned historiographer. The war correspondent now 
 scrawls his despatches as he sits in his saddle under the fire of the enemy; 
 he scrawls them with a pencil, noting and describing each incident of the 
 fight, so far as he can see it, as coolly as if he were describing a review of 
 volunteers in Hyde Park ; and he contrives to send off his narrative by 
 telegraph before the victor in the fight has begun to pursue, or has settled 
 down to hold the ground he won ; and the Avar correspondent's story 
 is expected to be as brilliant and picturesque in style as it ought to be 
 exact and faithful in its statements. In the days of the Crimea things had 
 not advanced quite so far as that ; the war was well on before the sub- 
 marine telegraph between Varna and the Crimea allowed of daily reports ; 
 but the feats of the war correspondent then filled men's minds with wonder. 
 When the expedition was leaving England it was accompanied by a special 
 correspondent from each of the great daily papers of London. The Times 
 sent out a representative whose name almost immediately became celebrated
 
 Ig64. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 397 
 
 Mr. William Howard Russell, the preux chevalier of war correspondents 
 in that day as Mr. Archibald Forbes of the Daily News is in this. Mr 
 Russell rendered some service to the English army arid to hia country, 
 however, which no brilliancy of literary style would alone have enabled 
 him to do. It was to his great credit as a man of judgment and observa- 
 tion that, being a civilian who had never before seen one puff of war-smoke, 
 he was able to distinguish between the confusion inseparable from all 
 actual levying of war and the confusion that comes of distinctly bad ad- 
 ministration. To the unaccustomed eye of an ordinary civilian the whole 
 progress of a campaign, the development of a battle, the arrangements of 
 the commissariat, appear, at any moment of actual pressure, to be nothing 
 but a mass of confusion. He is accustomed in civil life to find everything 
 in its proper place, and every emergency well provided for. When he if 
 suddenly plunged into the midst of a campaign he is apt to think that every- 
 thing must be going wrong ; or else he assumes contentedly that the whole 
 is in the hands of persons who know better than he, and that it would be 
 absurd on his part to attempt to criticise the arrangements of the men 
 whose business it is to understand them. Mr. Russell soon saw that there 
 was confusion; and he had the soundness of judgment to know that the 
 confusion was that of a breaking-down system. Therefore, while the 
 fervour of delight in the courage and success of our army was still fresh 
 in the minds of the public at home, while every music-hall was ringing 
 with the cheap rewards of valour in the shape of popular glorifications 
 of our commanders and our soldiers, the readers of the Times began to 
 learn that things Avere faring badly indeed with the conquering army of 
 the Alrna. The ranks were thinned by the ravages of cholera. The men 
 were pursued by cholera to the very battle-field, Lord Raglan himself 
 said. No system can charm away all the effects of climate ; but it appeared 
 only too soon that the arrangements made to encounter the indirect and 
 inevitable dangers of a campaign were miserably inefficient. The hospitals 
 were in a wretchedly disorganised condition. Stores of medicines and 
 strengthening food were decaying in places where no one wanted them or 
 could well get at them, while men were dying in hundreds among our 
 tents in the Crimea for lack of them. The system of clothing, of transport, 
 of feeding, of nursing everything had broken down. Ample provisions 
 had been got together and paid for ; and when they came to be needed no 
 one knew where to get at them. The special correspondent of the Times 
 and other correspondents continued to din these things into the ears of 
 the public at home. Exultation began to give way to a feeling of dismay. 
 The patriotic anger against the Russians was changed for a mood of deep 
 indignation against our own authorities and our own war administration.
 
 398 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. XXVM. 
 
 It soon became appamnt to everyone that the whole campaign had been 
 planned on the assumption that it was to be like the career of the hero 
 whom Byron laments, ' brief, brave, and glorious.' Our military authori- 
 ties here at home we do not speak of the commanders in the field had 
 made up their minds that Sebastopol was to fall like another Jericho, at 
 the sound of the war-trumpets' blast. 
 
 Our commanders in the field were, on the contrary, rather disposed to 
 overrate than to underrate the strength of the Kussians. It was, therefore, 
 somewhat like the condition of things described in Macaulay's ballad : 
 those behind cried forward, those in front called back. It is very likely 
 that if a sudden dash had been made at Sebastopol by land and sea, it 
 might have been taken almost at the very opening of the war. But the 
 delay gave the Russians full warning ; and they did not neglect it. On 
 the third day after the battle of the Alma the Russians sank seven vessels 
 of their Black Sea fleet at the entrance of the harbour of Sebastopol. 
 This was done full in the sight of the allied fleets, who, at first, misunder- 
 standing the movements going on among the enemy, thought the Russian 
 squadron were about to come out from their shelter and try conclusions 
 with the Western ships. But the real purpose of the Russians became 
 soon apparent. Under the eyes of the allies the seven vessels slowly settled 
 down and sank in the water until at last only the tops of their masts were 
 to be seen ; and the entrance of the harbour was barred as by sunken 
 rocks against any approach of an enemy's ship. There was an end to every 
 dream of a sudden capture of Sebastopol. 
 
 The allied armies moved again from their positions on the Alma; but 
 they did not direct their march to the north side of Sebastopol. They 
 made for Balaklava, which lies south of the city, on the other side of a 
 promontory, and which has a port that might enable them to secure a 
 constant means of communication between the armies and the fleets. To 
 reach Balaklava the allied forces had to undertake a long and fatiguing 
 flank march, passing Sebastopol on their right. They accomplished the 
 march in safety and occupied the heights above Balaklava, while the fleets 
 appeared at the same time in the harbour. Sebastopol was but a few miles 
 off, and preparations were at once made for an attack on it by land and 
 sea. On October 17 the attack began. It was practically a failure. 
 Nothing better indeed could well have been expected. The fleet could 
 not get near enough to the sea-forts of Sebastopol to make their broadsides 
 of any real effect, because of the shallow water and the sunken ships ; and 
 although the attack from the land was vigorous and was fiercely kept up, 
 yet it could not carry its object. It became clear that Sebastopol was not 
 to be taken by any coup de main ; and the allies had not men enough to
 
 1864. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 399 
 
 invest it. They were, therefore, to some extent themselves in the condition 
 of a besieged force, for the Russians had a large ariny outside Sebastopol 
 ready to make every sacrifice for the purpose of preventing the English and 
 French from getting even a chance of undisturbed operations against it. 
 
 The Russians attacked the allies fiercely on October 25, in the hope 
 of obtaining possession of Balaklava. The attempt was bold and brilliant ; 
 but it was splendidly repulsed. Never did a day of battle do more credit 
 to English courage, or less perhaps to English generalship. The cavalry 
 particularly distinguished themselves. It was in great measure on our side 
 a cavalry action. It will be memorable in all English history as the battle 
 in which occurred the famous charge of the Light Brigade. Owing to 
 some fatal misconception of the meaning of an order from the Commander- 
 in-Chief, the Light Brigade, 607 men in all, charged what has been rightly 
 described as ' the Russian army in position.' The brigade was composed 
 of 118 men of the 4th Light Dragoons; 104 of the 8th Hussars; 110 of 
 the llth Hussars; 130 of the 13th Light Dragoons; and 145 of the 17th 
 Lancers. Of the 607 men 198 came back. Long, painful, and hopeless 
 were the disputes about this fatal order. The controversy can never be 
 wholly settled. The officer who bore the order was one of the first who 
 fell in the outset. All Europe, all the world, rang with wonder and ad- 
 miration of the futile and splendid charge. The Poet Laureate sang of it 
 in spirited verses. Perhaps its best epitaph was contained in the celebrated 
 comment ascribed to the French General Bosquet, and which has since 
 become proverbial, and been quoted until men are well nigh tired of it 
 ' It was magnificent, but it was not war.' 
 
 Next day the enemy made another vigorous attack, on a much larger 
 scale, moving out of Sebastopol itself, and were again repulsed. The allies 
 were able to prevent the troops who made the sortie from co-operating 
 with the Russian army outside who had attacked at Balaklava. The latter 
 were endeavouring to entrench themselves at the little village of Inker- 
 man, lying on the north of Sebastopol ; but the stout resistance they met 
 with from the allies frustrated their plans. On November 5 the Russians 
 made another grand attack on the allies, chiefly on the British, but were 
 once more splendidly repulsed. The plateau of Inkerman was the princi- 
 pal scene of the struggle. It was occupied by the Guards and a few British 
 regiments, on whom fell, until General Bosquet with his French was able 
 to come to their assistance, the task of resisting a Russian army. This 
 was the severest and the fiercest engagement of the campaign. The loss 
 to the English was 2,612, of whom 145 were officers. The French lost 
 about 1,700. The Russians were believed to have lost 12,000 men; but 
 at no time could any clear account be obtained of the Russian losses. It
 
 400 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES CH. *xvn. 
 
 was believed that they brought a force of 50,000 men to the attack. 
 Inkerman was described at the time as the soldiers' battle. Strategy, it 
 was said everywhere, there was none. The attack was made under cover 
 of a dark and drizzling mist. The battle was fought for a while almost 
 absolutely in the dark. There was hardly any attempt to direct the allies 
 by any principles of scientific warfare. The soldiers fought stubbornly a 
 series of hand-to-hand fights, and we are entitled to say that the better men 
 won in the end. We fully admit that it was a soldiers' battle. All the 
 comment we have to make upon the epithet is, that we do not exactly know 
 which of the engagements fought in the Crimea was anything but a soldiers' 
 battle. Of course with the soldiers we take the officers. A battle in the 
 Crimea with which generalship had anything particular to do has certainly 
 not come under the notice of this writer. Mr. Kinglake tells that at Alma 
 Marshal St. Arnaud, the French Commander-in-Chief, addressing General 
 Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, said ' With such men as you, I have no 
 orders to give ; I have but to point to the enemy.' This seems to have 
 been the general principle on which the commanders conducted the cam- 
 paign. There were the enemy's forces let the men go at them any way 
 they could. Nor, under the circumstances, could anything much better 
 have been done. When orders were given it appeai-ed more than once as 
 if things would have gone better without them. The soldier won his 
 battle always. No general could prevent him from doing that. 
 
 Meanwhile what were people saying in England ? They were indig- 
 nantly declaring that the whole campaign was a muddle. It was evident 
 now that Sebastopol was not going to fall all at once ; it was evident too 
 that the preparations had been made on the assumption that it must fall 
 at once. To make disappointment more bitter at home, the public had 
 been deceived for a few days by a false report of the taking of Sebastopol ; 
 and the disappointment naturally increased the impatience and dissatisfac- 
 tion of Englishmen. The fleet that had been sent out to the Baltic came 
 back without having accomplished anything in particular ; and although 
 there really was nothing in particular that it could have accomplished 
 under the circumstances, yet many people were as angry as if it had cul- 
 pably allowed the enemy to escape it on the open seas. The sailing of 
 the Baltic fleet had indeed been preceded by ceremonials especially calcu- 
 lated to make any enterprise ridiculous which failed to achieve some 
 stariling success. It was put under the command of Sir Charles Napier, a 
 brave old salt of the fast-fading school of Smollett's Commodore Trunnion 
 rougl,, dashing, bull-headed, likely enough to succeed where sheer force 
 and courage could win victories, but wanting in all the intellectual qualities 
 of a commander, and endowed with a violent tongue and an almost unmatched
 
 ISM. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKa. 401 
 
 indiscretion. Sir Charles Napier was a member of a family famed for its 
 warriors ; but he had not anything like the capacity of his cousin the other 
 Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, or the intellect of Sir William 
 Napier, the historian of the Peninsular War. He had won some signal 
 and surprising successes in the Portuguese civil war and in Syria ; all 
 under conditions wholly different and with an enemy wholly different 
 from those he would have to encounter in the Baltic. But the voice of 
 admiring friends was tumultuously raised to predict splendid things for 
 him before his fleet had left its port, and he himself quite forgot, in his 
 rough self-confidence, tho difference between boasting when one is taking 
 off his armour and boasting when one is only putting it on. His friends 
 entertained him at a farewell dinner at the Reform Club. Lord Palmerston 
 was present and Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and 
 a great deal of exuberant nonsense was talked. Lord Palmerston, carried 
 away by his natural bonhomie and his high animal spirits, showered the 
 most extravagant praises upon the gallant admiral, intermixed with jokes 
 which set the company laughing consumedly, but which read by the outer 
 public next day seemed unbecoming preludes to an expedition that was to 
 be part of a great war and of terrible national sacrifices. The one only 
 thing that could have excused the whole performance would have been 
 some overwhelming success on the part of him who was its hero. But it 
 is not probable that a Dundonald, or even a Nelson, could have done much 
 in the Baltic just then ; and Napier was not a Dundonald or a Nelson. 
 The Baltic fleet came home safely after a while, its commander having 
 brought with him nothing but a grievance which lasted him all the re- 
 mainder of his life. The public were amazed, scornful, wrathful ; they 
 began to think that they were destined to see nothing but failure as the 
 fruit of the campaign. In truth, they were extravagantly impatient. Per- 
 haps they were not to be blamed. Their leaders, who ought to have 
 known better, had been filling them with the idea that they had nothing 
 to do but to sweep the enemy from sea and land. 
 
 The temper of a people thus stimulated and thus disappointed is almost 
 always indiscriminating and unreasonable in its censure. The first idea is 
 to find a victim. The victim on whom the anger of a large portion of the 
 public turned in this instance was the Prince Consort. The most absurd 
 ideas, the most cruel and baseless calumnies, were in circulation about 
 him. He was accused of having out of some inscrutable motive made use 
 of all his secret influence to prevent the success of the campaign. He was 
 charged with being in a conspiracy with Prussia, with Russia, with no one 
 knew exactly whom, to weaken the strength of England and secure a 
 triumph for her enemies. Stories were actually told at one time of hi? 
 
 VOL. I. D D
 
 402 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxvii. 
 
 having been arrested for high treason. He had in one of his speeches 
 about this time said that constitutional government was under a heavy 
 trial, and could only pass triumphantly through it if the country would 
 grant its confidence to her Majesty's Government. In this observation, as 
 the Avhole context of the speech showed, the Prince was only explaining 
 that the Queen's Government were placed at a disadvantage, in the carrying 
 on of a Avar, as compared with a Government like that of the Emperor of 
 the French, who could act of his own arbitrary will, without check, delay, 
 or control on the part of any Parliamentary body. But the speech was 
 instantly fastened on as illustrating the Prince's settled and unconquerable 
 dislike of all constitutional and popular principles of government. Those 
 who opposed the Prince had not indeed been waiting for his speech at the 
 Trinity House dinner to denounce and condemn him ; but the sentence in 
 that speech to which reference has been made opened upon him a new 
 torrent of hostile criticism. The charges which sprang of this heated and 
 unjust temper on the part of the public did not indeed long prevail against 
 the Prince Consort. When once the subject came to be taken up in 
 Parliament it was shown almost in a moment that there was not the 
 slightest ground or excuse for any of the absurd surmises and cruel sus- 
 picions which had been creating so much agitation. The agitation collapsed 
 in a moment. But while it lasted it was both vehement and intense, and 
 gave much pain to the Prince, and far more pain still to the Queen his wife. 
 We have seen more lately and on a larger scale something like the 
 phenomenon of that time. During the war between France and Germany 
 the people of Paris went nearly wild with the idea that they had been 
 betrayed, and were clamorous for victims to punish anywhere or anyhow. 
 To many calm Englishmen this seemed monstrously unreasonable and un- 
 worthy ; and the French people received from English writers many grave 
 rebukes and wise exhortations. But the temper of the English public at 
 one period of the Crimean War was becoming very like that which set 
 Paris wild during the disastrous struggle with Germany. The passions of 
 peoples are, it is to be feared, very much alike in their impulses and even 
 in their manifestations; and if England during the Crimean War never 
 came to the wild condition into which Paris fell during the later struggle, 
 it is perhaps rather because, on the whole, things went well with England, 
 than in consequence of any very great superiority of Englishmen in judg- 
 ment and self-restraint over the excitable people of France. Certainly, 
 those who remember what we may call the dark days of the Crimean 
 campaign, when disappointment following on extravagant confidence had 
 incited popular passion to call for some victim, will find themselves .slow 
 to set a limit to the lengths that passion might have reached if the Russians 
 had actually been successful even in one or two battles.
 
 1864-5. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 403 
 
 The winter was gloomy at home as well as abroad. The news con- 
 stantly arriving from the Crimea told only of devastation caused by foes 
 far more formidable than the Russians sickness, bad weather, bad manage- 
 ment. The Black Sea was swept and scourged by terrible storms. The 
 destruction of transport-ships laden with winter stores for our men was 
 of incalculable injury to the army. Clothing, blanketing, provisions, 
 hospital necessaries of all kinds, were destroyed in vast quantities. The 
 loss of life among the crews of the vessels was immense. A storm was 
 nearly as disastrous in this way as a battle. On shore the sufferings of 
 the army were unspeakable. The tents were torn from their pegs and 
 blown away. The officers and men were exposed to the bitter cold and 
 the fierce stormy blasts. Our soldiers had for the most part little expe- 
 rience or even idea of such cold as they had to encounter this gloomy 
 winter. The intensity of the cold was so great that no one might dare to 
 touch any metal substance in the open air with his bare hand under penalty 
 of leaving the skin behind him. The hospitals for the sick and wounded 
 at Scutari were in a wretchedly disorganised condition. They were for 
 the most part in an absolutely chaotic condition as regards arrangement 
 and supply. In some instances medical stores were left to decay at Varna, 
 or were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay, 
 which were needed for the wounded at Scutari. The medical officers 
 were able and zealous men ; the stores were provided and paid for so far 
 as our Government was concerned ; but the stores were not brought to 
 the medical men. These had their hands all but idle, their eyes and souls 
 tortured by the sight of sufferings which they were unable to relieve 
 for the want of the commonest appliances of the hospital. The most 
 extraordinary instances of blunder and confusion were constantly coming 
 to light. Great consignments of boots arrived, and were found to be all 
 for the left foot. Mules for the conveyance of stores were contracted for 
 and delivered, but delivered so that they came into the hands of the 
 Russians and not of us. Shameful frauds were perpetrated in the instance 
 of some of the contracts for preserved meat. ' One man's preserved meat,' 
 exclaimed Punch with bitter humour, ' is another man's poison.' The 
 evils of the hospital disorganisation were happily made a means of bring- 
 ing about a new system of attending to the sick and wounded in war which 
 has already created something like a revolution in the manner of treating 
 the victims of battle. Mr. Sidney Herbert, horrified at the way in which 
 things were managed in Scutari and the Crimea, applied to a distinguished 
 woman who had long taken a deep interest in hospital reform to superin- 
 tend personally the nursing of the soldiers. Miss Florence Nightingale 
 was the daughter of a wealthy English country gentleman. She had 
 
 I) D 2
 
 404 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvn. 
 
 chosen not to pass her life in fashionable or aesthetic inactivity, and had 
 from a very early period turned her attention to sanitary questions. She 
 had studied nursing as a science and a system ; had made herself acquainted 
 with the working of various continental institutions ; and about the time 
 when the war broke out she was actually engaged in reorganising the Sick 
 Governesses' Institution in Harley Street, London. To her Mr. Sidney 
 Herbert turned. He offered her, if she would accept the task he proposed, 
 plenary authority over all the nurses, and unlimited power of drawing on 
 the Government for whatever she might think necessary to the success of 
 her undertaking. Miss Nightingale accepted the task, and went out to 
 Scutari accompanied by some women of rank like her own and a trained 
 staff of nurses. They speedily reduced chaos into order ; and from the 
 time of their landing in Scutari there was at least one department of the 
 business o war which was never again a subject of complaint. The 
 spirit of the chivalric days had been restored iinder better auspices for its 
 abiding influence. Ladies of rank once more devoted themselves to the 
 service of the wounded ; and the end was come of the Mrs. Gamp and 
 Mrs. Prig type of nurse. Sidney Herbert, in his letter to Miss Nightin- 
 gale, had said that her example, if she accepted the task he proposed, 
 would ' multiply the good to all time.' These words proved to have no 
 exaggeration in them. We have never seen a war since in which women 
 of education and of genuine devotion have not given themselves up to 
 the task of caring for the wounded. The Geneva Convention and the 
 bearing of the Red Cross are among the results of Florence Nightingale's 
 work in the Crimea. 
 
 But the siege of Sebastopol was meanwhile dragging heavily along ; 
 and sometimes it was not quite certain which ought to be called the 
 besieged the Russians in the city or the allies encamped in sight of it. 
 During some months the allied armies did little or nothing. The com- 
 missariat system and the land transport system had broken down. The 
 armies were miserably weakened by sickness. Cholera was ever and 
 anon raging anew among our men. Horses and mules were dying of cold 
 and starvation. The roads were only deep irregular ruts filled with mud; 
 the camp was a marsh ; the tents stood often in pools of water ; the men 
 had sometimes no beds but straw dripping with wet ; and hardly any bed 
 coverings. Our unfortunate Turkish allies were in a far more wretched 
 plight than even we ourselves. The authorities who ought to have looked 
 after them were impervious to the criticisms of special correspondents 
 and unassailable by Parliamentary votes of censure. A condemnation ol 
 the latter kind was hanging over our Government. Lord John Russell 
 became impressed with the conviction that the Duke of Newcastle wn?
 
 1856. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 405 
 
 not strong enough for the post of War Minister, and ho wrote to Lord 
 Aberdeen urging that the War Department should bo given to Lord 
 Palmerston. Lord Aberdeen replied that although another person might 
 have been a better choice when the appointments Avere made in the first 
 instance, yet, in the absence of any proved defect or alleged incapacity, 
 there was no sufficient ground for making a kind of speculative change. 
 Parliament was called together before Christmas ; and after the Christmas 
 recess Mr. Roebuck gave notice that he would move for a select committee 
 to inquire into the condition of the army before Sebastopol and into the 
 conduct of those departments of the Government whose duty it had been 
 to minister to the wants of the army. Lord John Russell did not believe 
 for himself that the motion could be conscientiously resisted ; but as it 
 necessarily involved a censure upon some of his colleagues, he did not 
 think he ought to remain longer in the Ministry, and he therefore resigned 
 his office. The sudden resignation of the leader of the House of Com- 
 mons was a death-blow to any plans of resistance by which the Govern- 
 ment might otherwise have thought of encountering Mr. Roebuck's 
 motion. Lord Palmerston, although Lord John Russell's course was 
 a marked tribute to his own capacity, had remonstrated warmly with 
 Russell by letter as to his determination to resign. ' You will have the 
 appearance,' he said, ' of having remained in office aiding in carrying on 
 a system of which you disapprove until driven out by Roebuck's an- 
 nounced notice, and the Government will have the appearance of self- 
 condemnation by flying from a discussion which they dare not face ; 
 while as regards the country the action of the Executive will be paralysed 
 for a time in a critical moment of a great war, with an impending nego- 
 tiation, and we shall exhibit to the world a melancholy spectacle of dis- 
 organisation among our political men at home similar to that which has 
 prevailed among our military men abroad.' The remonstrance, however, 
 came too late, even if it could have had any effect at any time. Mr. 
 Roebuck's motion came on, and was resisted with vigour by Lord Palmer- 
 ston and Mr. Gladstone. Lord Palmerston insisted that the responsi- 
 bility ought to fall not on the Duke of Newcastle, but on the whole 
 Cabinet ; and with a generosity which his keenest opponents might have 
 admitted to be characteristic of him, he accepted the task of defend- 
 ing an Administration whose chief blame was in the eyes of most 
 persons that they had not given the control of the war into his hands. 
 Mr. Gladstone declared that the inquiry sought for by the resolution 
 could lead to nothing but ' confusion and disturbance, increased 
 disasters, shame at home and weakness abroad; it would convey no con- 
 solation to those whom you seek to aid, but it would carry malignant joy
 
 406 A. HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxvn 
 
 to the hearts of the enemies of England.' The House of Commons was 
 not to be moved by any such argument or appeal. The one pervading 
 idea was that England had been endangered and shamed by the break- 
 down of her army organisation. When the division took place 305 mem- 
 bers voted for Mr. Roebuck's motion and only 148 against. The majority 
 against Ministers was therefore 157. Everyone knows what a scene usually 
 takes place when a Ministry is defeated in the House of Commons. Cheer- 
 ing again and again renewed, counter-cheers of defiance, wild exultation, 
 vehement indignation, a whole whirlpool of various emotions seething in 
 that little hall in St. Stephen's. But this time there was no such outburst. 
 The House could hardly realise the fact that the Ministry of all the 
 talents had been thus completely and ignominiou.sly defeated. A dead 
 silence followed the announcement of the numbers. Then there was a 
 half-breathless murmur of amazement and incredulity. The Speaker 
 repeated the numbers, and doubt was over. It was still uncertain how 
 the House would express its feelings. Suddenly some one laughed. The 
 sound gave a direction and a relief to perplexed, pent-up emotion. Shouts 
 of laughter followed. Not merely the pledged opponents of the Govern- 
 ment laughed. Many of those who had voted with Ministers found them- 
 selves laughing too. It seemed so absurd, so incongruous, this way of 
 disposing of the great Coalition Government. Many must have thought 
 of the night of fierce debate, little more than two years before, when Mr. 
 Disraeli, then on the verge of his fall from power and realising fully the 
 strength of the combination against him, consoled his party and himself 
 for the imminent fatality awaiting them by the defiant words, ' I know 
 that I have to face a Coalition ; the combination may be successful. A 
 combination has before this been successful ; but coalitions, though they 
 may be successful, have always found that their triumphs have been brief. 
 This I know, that England does not love coalitions.' Only two years had 
 passed and the great Coalition had fallen, overwhelmed with reproach anc 
 popular indignation, and amid sudden shouts of laughter. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE CLOBE OF THE WAR. 
 
 ON February 15, 1855, Lord Palmcrston wrote to his brother : 'A month 
 ago if any man had asked me to say what was one of the most improbable 
 events, I should have said my being Prime Minister. Aberdeen was 
 there, Derby was the head of one great party, John liussell of the other; 
 ind yt't in about ten days' time they all gave way like straws before the
 
 18/55 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 407 
 
 wind ; and so hero am I, writing to you from Downing Street as First 
 Lord of the Treasury.' 
 
 No doubt Lord Palmorstou was sincere in the expression of surprisa 
 which he have quoted ; but there were not many other men in the country 
 who felt in the least astonished at the turn of events by which he had become 
 Prime Minister. Indeed it had long become apparent to almost everyone 
 that his assuming that place was only a question of time. The country 
 was in that mood that it would absolutely have somebody at the head of 
 affairs who knew his own mind and saw his way clearly before him. 
 When the Coalition Ministry broke down, Lord Derby was invited by 
 the Queen to form a Government. He tried and failed. He did all in his 
 power to accomplish the task with which the Queen had entrusted him. 
 He invited Lord Palmerston to join him, and it was intimated that if 
 Palmerston consented Mr. Disraeli would waive all claim to the leadership 
 of the House of Commons, in order that Palmerston should have that place. 
 Lord Derby also offered, through Lord Palmerston, places in his Adminis- 
 tion to Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sidney Herbert. Palmerston did not see 
 his way to join a Derby Administration, and without him Lord Derby 
 could not go on. The Queen then sent for Lord John Russell ; but 
 Russell's late and precipitate retreat from his office had discredited him 
 with most of his former colleagues ; and he found that he could not get a 
 Government together. Lord Palmerston was then, to use his own phrase, 
 I' inevitable. There was not much change in the personnel of the Ministry. 
 Lord Aberdeen was gone, and Lord Palmerston took his place ; and Lord 
 Panmure, who had formerly as Fox Maule administered the affairs of the 
 army, succeeded the Duke of Newcastle. Lord Panmure, however, com- 
 bined in his own person the functions, up to that time absurdly separated, 
 of Secretary-at-War and Secretary-for-War. The Secretary-at-War 
 under the old system was not one of the principal Secretaries of State. 
 He was merely the officer by whom the regular communication was kept 
 up between the War Office and the Ministry, and has been described 
 is the civil officer of the army. The Secretary-for-War was commonly 
 entrusted with the Colonial department as well. The two War Offices were 
 now made into one. It was hoped that by this change great benefit would 
 come to our whole army system. Lord Palmerston acted energetically 
 too in sending out a sanitary commission to the Crimea, and a com- 
 mission to superintend the commissariat, a department that, almost more 
 than any other, had broken down. Nothing could be more strenuous than 
 the terms in which Lord Palmerstou recommended the sanitary commis- 
 sion to Lord Raglan. He requested that Lord Raglan would give the 
 commissioners every assistance in his power. ' They will, of course, be
 
 408 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvm. 
 
 opposed and thwarted by the medical officers, by the men who have 
 charge of the port arrangements, and by those who have the cleaning of 
 the camp. Their mission will be ridiculed, and their recommendations 
 and directions set aside, unless enforced by the peremptory exercise of 
 your authority. But that authority I must request you to exert in the 
 most peremptory manner for the immediate and exact carrying into execu- 
 tion whatever changes of arrangement they may recommend ; for these 
 are matters on which depend the health and lives of many hundreds of 
 men, I may indeed say of thousands.' Lord Palmerston was strongly 
 pressed by some of the more strenuous Reformers of the House. Mr. 
 Layard, who had acquired some celebrity before in a very different field, 
 as a discoverer, that is to say, in the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, was 
 energetic and incessant in his attacks on the administration of the war, and 
 was not disposed even now to give the new Government a moment's rest. 
 Mr. Layard was a man of a certain rough ability, immense self-sufficiency, 
 and indomitable egotism. He was not in any sense an eloquent speaker; he 
 was singularly wanting in all the graces of style and manner. But he was 
 fluent, he was vociferous, he never seemed to have a moment's doubt on 
 any conceivable question, he never admitted that there could by any 
 possibility be two sides to any matter of discussion. He did really know 
 a great deal about the East at a time when the habit of travelling in the 
 East was comparatively rare. He stamped down all doubt or difference 
 of view with the overbearing dogmatism of Sir Walter Scott's Touchwood, 
 or of the proverbial man who has been there and ought to know ; and he 
 was in many respects admirably fitted to be the spokesman of all those, 
 and they were not a few, who saw that things had been going wrong 
 without exactly seeing why, and were eager that something should be 
 done, although they did not clearly know what. Lord Palmerston strove 
 to induce the House not to press for the appointment of the committee 
 recommended in Mr. Roebuck's motion. The Government, he said, 
 would make the needful inquiries themselves. He reminded the House of 
 Richard II.'s offer to lead the men of the fallen Tyler's insurrection him- 
 self; and in the same spirit he offered on the part of the Government to 
 take the lead in every necessary investigation. Mr. Roebuck, however, 
 would not give way, and Lord Palmerston yielded to a demand which had 
 undoubtedly the support of a vast force of public opinion. The constant 
 argument of Mr. Layard had some sense in it : the Government now in 
 office was very much like the Government in which the House had declared 
 so lately that it had no confidence. It could hardly, therefore, be expected 
 that the House should accept its existence as guarantee enough that every- 
 thing should be done which its predecessor had failed to do. Lord Pal-
 
 1855. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 109 
 
 merston gave way, but his unavoidable concession brought on a new 
 ministerial crisis. Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Sidney 
 Herbert declined to hold office any longer. They had opposed the mo- 
 tion lor an inquiry most gravely and strenuously, and they would not 
 lend any countenance to it by remaining in office. Sir Charlea Wood 
 succeeded Sir James Graham as First Lord of the Admiralty; Lord John 
 Russell took the place of Secretary for the Colonies, vacated by Sidney 
 Herbert; and Sir George Cornewall Lewis followed Mr. Gladstone as 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 
 Meanwhile new negotiations for peace, set on foot under the influence 
 of Austria, had been begun at Vienna, and Lord John Russell had been 
 sent there to represent the interests of England. The Conference opened 
 at Vienna under circumstances that might have seemed especially favour- 
 able to peace. We had got a new ally, a State not indeed commanding 
 any great military strength, but full of energy and ambition, and repre- 
 senting more than any other perhaps the tendencies of liberalism and the 
 operation of the comparatively new principle of the rights of nationalities. 
 This was the little kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was then under 
 the control of one of the master-spirits of modern politics ; a man who 
 belonged to the class of the Richelieus and the Orange Williams, the illus- 
 trious Count Cavour. Sardinia, it may be frankly said, did not come into 
 the alliance because of any particular sympathies that she had with one 
 side or the other of the quarrel between Russia and the Western Powers. 
 She went into the war in order that she might have a locus standi in the 
 councils of Europe from which to set forth her grievances against Austria. 
 In the marvelloiis history of the uprise of the kingdom of Italy there is a 
 good deal over which, to use the words of Carlyle, moralities not a few must 
 shriek aloud. It would not be easy to defend on high moral principles the 
 policy which struck into a war without any particular care for either side 
 of the controversy, but only to serve an ulterior and personal, that is to 
 say, national purpose. But regarding the policy merely by the light of 
 its results, it must be owned that it was singularly successful and entirely 
 justified the expectations of Cavour. The Crimean War laid the founda- 
 tions of the kingdom of Italy. 
 
 That was one fact calculated to inspire hopes of a peace. The greater 
 the number and strength of the Allies, the greater obviously the pressure 
 upon Russia and the probability of her listening to reason. But there 
 was another event of a very different nature, the effect of which seemed 
 at first likely to be all in favour of peace. This was the death of the man 
 whom the united public opinion of Europe regarded as the author of the 
 var. On March 2, 1855, the Emperor Nicholas of Russia died of pul-
 
 410 A HISTOKY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxvrn 
 
 monary apoplexy, after an attack of influenza. In other days it would 
 have been said he had died of a broken heart. Perhaps the description 
 would have been more strictly true than the terms of the medical report. 
 It was doubtless the effect of utter disappointment, of the wreck and ruin 
 of hopes to which a life's ambition had been directed and a life's energy 
 dedicated, which left that frame of adamant open to the sudden dart of 
 sickness. One of the most remarkable illustrations of an artist's geniua 
 devoted to a political subject was the cartoon which appeared in Punch, 
 and which was called ' General Fe"vrier turned Traitor.' The Emperor 
 Nicholas had boasted that Russia had two generals on whom she could 
 always rely General Janvier and General Fe"vrier ; and now the English 
 artist represented General February, a skeleton in Russian uniform, turn- 
 ing traitor and laying his bony ice-cold hand on the heart of the sovereign 
 and betraying him to the tomb. But, indeed, it was not General February 
 alone who doomed Nicholas to death. The Czar died of broken hopes ; 
 of the recklessness that comes from defeat and despair. He took no pre- 
 cautions against cold and exposure ; he treated with a magnanimous disdain 
 the remonstrances of his physicians and his friends. As of Max Piccolo- 
 mini in Schiller's noble play, so of him : men whispered that he wished to 
 die. The Alma was to him what Austerlitz was to Pitt. From the 
 moment when the news of that defeat was announced to him he no longer 
 seemed to have hope of the campaign. He took the story of the defeat 
 very much as Lord North took the surrender of Cornwallis as if a bullet 
 had struck him. Thenceforth he was like one whom the old Scotch phrase 
 would describe as/ey ; one who moved, spoke and lived under the shadow 
 of coming death, until the death came. 
 
 The news of the sudden death of the Emperor created a profound sen- 
 sation in England. Mr. Bright, at Manchester, shortly after rebuked what 
 he considered an ignoble levity in the manner of commenting on the event 
 among some of the English journals ; but it is right to say that on the 
 whole nothing could have been more decorous and dignified than the 
 manner in which the English public generally received the news that the 
 country's great enemy was no more. At first there was, as we have said, 
 a common impression that Nicholas's son and successor, Alexander II., 
 would be more anxious to make peace than his father had been. But this 
 hope was soon gone. The new Czar could not venture to show himself 
 to his people in a less patriotic light than his predecessor. The prospects 
 of the Allies were at the time remarkably gloomy. There must have 
 seemed to the new Russian Emperor considerable ground for the hope that 
 disease, and cold, and bad management would do more harm to the array 
 of England at least than any Russian general could do. The Conference
 
 1856 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 411 
 
 at Vienna prored a failure, and even in some respects a fiasco. Lord 
 John Russell, sent to Vienna as our representative, was instructed that 
 the object he must hold in view was the admission of Turkey into the 
 great family of European States. For this end there were four principal 
 points to be considered : the condition of the Danubian Principalities, the 
 free navigation of the Danube, the limitation of Russian supremacy in the 
 Black Sea, and the independence of the Porte. It was on the attempt to 
 limit Russian supremacy in the Black Sea that the negotiations became a 
 failure. Russia would not consent to any proposal which could really 
 have the desired effect. She would agree to an arrangement between 
 Turkey and herself, but this was exactly what the Western Powers were 
 determined not to allow. She declined to have the strength of her navy 
 restricted ; and proposed as a counter-resolution that the Straits should be 
 opened to the war flags of all nations, so that if Russia were strong a.s a 
 naval Power in the Black Sea, other Powers might be just as strong if 
 they thought fit. Lord Palmerston, in a letter to Lord John Russell, 
 drily characterised this proposition, involving as it would the maintenance 
 by England and France of permanent fleets in the Black Sea to counter- 
 balance the fleet of Russia, as a ' mauvaise plaisanterie? Lord Palmerston 
 indeed believed no more in the sincerity of Austria throughout all these 
 transactions than he did in that of Russia. The Conference proved a total 
 failure, and in its failure it involved a good deal of the reputation of Lord 
 John Russell. Like the French representative, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, 
 Lord John Russell had been taken by the proposals of Austria and had 
 supported them in the first instance ; but when the Government at home 
 would not have them he was still induced to remain a member of the 
 Cabinet and even to condemn in the House of Commons the recommenda- 
 tions he had supported at Vienna. He was charged by Mr. Disraeli with 
 having encouraged the Russian pretensions by declaring at a critical point 
 of the negotiations that he was disposed to favour whatever arrangement 
 would best preserve the honour of Russia. ' What has the representative 
 of England,' Mr. Disraeli indignantly asked, ' to do with the honour of 
 Russia ? ' Lord John had indeed a fair reply. He could say with justice 
 and good sense that no settlement was likely to be lasting which simply 
 forced conditions upon a great power like Russia without taking any 
 account of what is considered among nations to be her honour. But he 
 was not able to give any satisfactory explanation of his having approved 
 the conditions in Vienna which he afterwards condemned in Westminster. 
 He explained in Parliament that he did in the first instance regard the 
 Austrian propositions as containing the possible basis of a satisfactory and 
 lasting peace ; but that as the Government would not hear of them he had
 
 112 A HISTORY OF OUil OWN TIMES. CH. xxvm. 
 
 rejected them against his own judgment ; and that he had afterwards been 
 converted to the opinion of his colleagues and believed them inadmissible 
 in principle. This was a sort of explanation more likely to alarm than to 
 reassure the public. What manner of danger, it was asked on all sides, 
 may we not be placed in when our representatives do not know their own 
 minds as to proper terms of peace ; when they have no opinion of their 
 own upon the subject, but are loud in approval of certain conditions one 
 day which they are equally loud in condemning the next ? There was a 
 general impression throughout England that some of our statesmen in office 
 had never been sincerely in favour of the war from the first ; that even 
 still they were cold, doubtful, and half-hearted about it, and that the 
 honour of the country was not safe in such hands. The popular instinct, 
 whether it was right as to facts or not, was perfectly sound as to inferences. 
 We may honour, in many instances we must honour, the conscientious 
 scruples of a public man who distrusts the objects and has no faith in the 
 results of some war in which his people are engaged. But such a man 
 has no business in the Government which has the conduct of the war. 
 The men who are to carry on a war must have no doubt of its rightfulness 
 of purpose, and must not be eager to conclude it on any terms. In the 
 very interests of peace itself they must be resolute to carry on the war 
 until it has reached the end they sought for. 
 
 Lord John Russell's remaining in office after these disclosures was 
 practically impossible. Sir E. B. Lytton gave notice of a direct vote of 
 censure on ' the Minister charged with the negotiations at Vienna.' But 
 Russell anticipated the certain effect of a vote in the House of Commons by 
 resigning his office. This step at least extricated his colleagues from any 
 share in the censure, although the recriminations that passed on the oc- 
 casion in Parliament were many and bitter. The vote and censure was 
 however withdrawn. Sir William Molesworth, one of the most distin- 
 guished of the school who were since called Philosophical Radicals, suc- 
 ceeded him as Colonial Secretary ; and the Ministry carried one or two 
 triumphant votes against Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Roebuck, and other opponents, 
 or at least unfriendly critics. Meanwhile the Emperor of the French and 
 his wife had paid a visit to London and had been received with consider- 
 able enthusiasm. The Queen seems to have been very favourably im- 
 pressed by the Emperor. She sincerely admired him, nnd believed in his 
 desire to maintain peace as far as possible, and to do his best for the pro- 
 motion of liberal principles and sound economic doctrines throughout 
 Europe. The beauty and grace of the Empress likewise greatly won over 
 Queen Victoria. The Prince Consort seems to have been less impressed. 
 lie was indeed a believer in the sincerity and good disposition of the Em-
 
 1865. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 413 
 
 peror, but he found him strangely ignorant on most subjects, oven the 
 modern political history of England and France. During the visit of the 
 Royal Family of England to France, and now while the Emperor and Em- 
 press were in London, the same impression appears to have been left on 
 the mind of the Prince Consort. He also seems to have noticed a certain 
 barrack-room flavour about the Emperor's entourage which was not agree- 
 able to his own ideas of dignity and refinement. The Prince Consort 
 appears to have judged the Emperor almost exactly as we know now that 
 Prince Bismarck did then, and as impartial opinion has judged him every- 
 where in Europe since that time. 
 
 The operations in the Crimea were renewed with some vigour. The 
 English army lost much by the death of its brave and manly Commarider- 
 in-Chief, Lord Raglan. He was succeeded by General Simpson, who had 
 recently been sent out to the Crimea as Chief of the Staff, and whose 
 administration during the short time that he held the command was at 
 least well qualified to keep Lord Raglan's memory green and to prevent 
 the regret for his death from losing any of its keenness. The French army 
 had lost its first commander long before the versatile, reckless, brilliant 
 soldier of fortune, St. Arnaud, whose broken health had from the opening 
 of the campaign prevented him from displaying any of the qualities which 
 his earlier career gave men reason to look for under his command. After 
 St. Arnaud's death the command was transferred for a while to General 
 Canrobert, who, finding himself hardly equal to the tusk, resigned it in 
 favour of General Pelissier. The Sardinian contingent had arrived and 
 had given admirable proof of its courage and discipline. On August 16, 
 1855, the Russians, under General Liprandi, made a desperate effort to 
 raise the siege of Sebastopol by an attack on the allied forces. The attack 
 was skilfully planned during the night, and was made in great strength. 
 The French divisions had to bear the principal weight of the attack ; but 
 the Sardinian contingent also had a prominent place in tho resistance, and 
 bore themselves with splendid bravery and success. The attempt of the 
 Russians was completely foiled ; and all Northern Italy was thrown into 
 wild delight by the news that the flag of Piedmont had been carried to 
 victory over the troops of one great European Power, and side by side 
 with those of two others. The unanimous voice of the country now 
 approved and acclaimed the policy of Cavour, which had been sanctioned 
 only by a very namiw majority, had been denounced from all sides as 
 reckless and senseless, and had been carried out in the face of the most 
 tremendous difficulties. It was the first great illustration of CavourV 
 habitual policy of blended audacity and cool far-seeing judgment. It is :< 
 curious fart that the suggestion to send Sardinian troops to tin Crimea did
 
 414 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvm. 
 
 not originate in Cavours own busy brain. The first thought of it came 
 up in the mind of a woman, Cavour's niece. The great statesman was 
 struck with the idea from the moment when she suggested it. He 
 thought over it deeply, resolved to adopt it, and carried it to triumphant 
 success. 
 
 The repulse of the Tchernaya was a heavy, indeed a fatal stroke for 
 the Russians. The siege had been progressing for some time with con- 
 siderable activity. The French had drawn their lines nearer and nearer 
 to the besieged city. The Russians, however, had also been throwing up 
 fresh works, which brought them nearer to the lines of the allies, and 
 sometimes made the latter seem as if they were the besieged rather than the 
 besiegers. The MalakofE tower and the Mamelon battery in front of it 
 became the scenes and the objects of constant struggle. The Russians 
 made desperate night-sorties again and again, and were always repulsed. 
 On June 7 the English assaulted the quarries in front of the Redan, and 
 the French attacked the Mamelon. The attack on both sides was success- 
 ful; but it was followed on the 18th of the same month by a desperate 
 and wholly unsuccessful attack on the Redan and MalakofF batteries. 
 There was some misapprehension on the side of the French commander, 
 which led to a lack of precision and unity in the carrying out of the 
 enterprise, and it became, therefore, a failure on the part of both the allies. 
 A pompous and exulting address was issued by Prinoe Gortschakoff, in 
 which he informed the Russian army that the enemy had been beaten, 
 driven back with enormous loss ; and announced that the hour was 
 approaching ' when the pride of the enemy will be lowered, their armies 
 swept from our soil like chaff blown away by the wind.' 
 
 On September 5 the Allies made an attack almost simultaneously upon 
 the Malakoff and the Redan. It was agreed that as soon as the French 
 had got possession of the Malakoff the English should attack the Redan, 
 the hoisting cf the French flag on the former fort to be the signal for our 
 men to move. The French were brilliantly successful in their part of the 
 attack, and in a quarter of an hour from the beginning of the attempt the 
 flag of the Empire was floating on the parapets. The English then at 
 once advanced upon the Redan ; but it was a very different task from that 
 which the French had had to undertake. The French were near the 
 Malakoff ; the English were very far away from the Redan. The distance 
 our soldiers had to traverse left them almost helplessly exposed to the 
 Russian fire. They stormed the parapets of the Redan despite all the 
 difficulties of their attack ; but they were not able to hold the place. The 
 attacking party were far too small in numbers ; reinforcements did not 
 come in time; the English held their own fur an hour against odda
 
 185ft. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 415 
 
 that might have seemed overwhelming ; but it was simply impossible for 
 them to establish themselves in the Hedan, and the remnant of them that 
 could withdraw had to retreat to the trenches. It was only the old story 
 of the war. Superb courage and skill of officers and men ; outrageounly 
 bad generalship. The attack might have been renewed that day, but the 
 English Commander-in-Chief, General Simpson, declared with naivete that 
 the trenches were too crowded for him to do anything. Thus the attack 
 failed because there were too few men, and could not be renewed because 
 there were too many. The cautious commander resolved to make another 
 attempt the next morning. But before the morrow came there was 
 nothing to attack. The Russians withdrew during the night from the 
 south side of Sebastopol. A bridge of boats had been constructed across 
 the bay to connect the north and the south sides of the city, and across 
 this bridge Prince Gortschakoff quietly withdrew his troops. The bom- 
 bardment kept up by the Allies had been so terrible and so close for several 
 days, and their long-range guns were so entirely superior to anything 
 possessed by or indeed known to the Russians, that the defences of the 
 south side were being irreparably destroyed. The Russian general felt 
 that it would be impossible lor him to hold the city much longer, and that 
 to remain there was only useless waste of life. But, as he said in his own 
 despatch, 'it is not Sebastopol which we have left to them, but the burning 
 ruins of the town, which we ourselves set fire to, having maintained the 
 honour of the defence in such a manner that our great grandchildren may 
 recall with pride the remembrance of it and send it on to all posterity.' 
 It was some time before the Allies could venture to enter the abandoned 
 city. The arsenals and powder-magazines were exploding, the flames 
 were bursting out of every public building and every private house. The 
 Russians had made of Sebastopol another Moscow. 
 
 With the close of that long siege, which had lasted nearly a year, the 
 war may be said to have ended. The brilliant episode of Kars, its 
 splendid defence and its final surrender, was brought to its conclusion, 
 indeed, after the fall of Sebastopol ; but, although it naturally attracted 
 peculiar attention in this country, it could have no effect on the actual 
 fortunes of such a war. Kars was defended by Colonel Fenwick Williams, 
 an English officer, who had been sent, all too late, to reorganise the 
 Turkish forces in Armenia after they had suffered a terrible defeat at the 
 hands of the Russians. Never probably had a man a more difficult task 
 than that which fell to the lot of Williams. He had to contend against 
 official stupidity, corruption, delay; he could get nothing done without 
 having first to remove whole mountains of obstruction, and to quicken 
 into life and movement an apathy which so^ned like that of a paralysed
 
 416 A HISTO.RY OF OUR OWN TIMES CH. xxvni. 
 
 system. He concentrated his efforts at last upon the defence of Kars, and 
 be held the place against overwhelming Russian forces, and against an 
 enemy far more appalling, starvation itself. With his little garrison he 
 repelled a tremendous attack of the Russian army under General Moura- 
 vieff, in a battle that lasted nearly seven hours, and as the result of which 
 the Russians left on the field more than five thousand dead. He had to 
 surrender at last to famine ; but the very articles of surrender to which 
 the conqueror consented became the trophy of Williams and his men. 
 The garrison were allowed to leave the place with all the honours of war ; 
 and, ' as a testimony to the valorous resistance made by the garrison of 
 Kars, the officers of all ranks are to keep their swords.' Williams and his 
 English companions, Colonel Lake, Major Teesdale, Major Thompson, and 
 Dr. Sandwith, had done as much for the honour of their country at the 
 close of the war as Butler and Nasmyth and Ballard had done at its 
 opening. The curtain of that great drama rose and fell upon a splendid 
 scene of English heroism. 
 
 The war was virtually over. Austria had been exerting herself 
 throughout its progress in the interests of peace, and after the fall of 
 Sebastopol she made a new effort with greater success. Two of the belli- 
 gerents -were indeed now anxious to be out of the struggle almost on any 
 terms. These were France and Russia. The new Emperor of Russia 
 was not a man personally inclined for war; nor had he his father's over- 
 bearing and indomitable temper. He could not but see that his father 
 had greatly overrated the military strength and resources of his country. 
 He had accepted the war only as a heritage of necessary evil, with little 
 hope of any good to come of it to Russia ; and he welcomed any chance 
 of ending it on fair terms. France, or at least her Emperor, was all but 
 determined to get back again into peace. If England had held out, it is 
 highly probable that she Avould have had to do so alone. For this indeed 
 Lord Palmerston was fully prepared as a last resource, sooner than submit 
 to terms which he considered unsatisfactory. He said so and he meant it. 
 ' I can fancy,' Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord Clarendon in his bright 
 good-humoured way, ' how I should be hooted in the House of Commons 
 if I were to get up and say that we had agreed to an imperfect and un- 
 satisfactory arrangement. ... I had better beforehand take the Chiltern 
 Hundreds.' Lord Palmerston, however, had no occasion to take the Chil- 
 tern Hundreds; the Congress of Paris opened on February 2G, 1850, and 
 on March 30 the treaty of peace was signed by the plenipotentiaries of 
 the Great Powers. Prussia had been admitted to the Congress, which 
 therefore represented England, France, Austria, Prussia, Turkey and 
 Sardinia.
 
 1856. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 417 
 
 The treaty began by declaring that Kara was to be restored to the 
 Sultan, and that Sebastopol and all other places taken by the Allies were 
 to be given back to Russia. The Sublime Porto was admitted to par- 
 ticipate in all the advantages of the public law and system of Europe. 
 The other Powers engaged to respect the independence and territorial 
 integrity of Turkey. They guaranteed in common the strict observance 
 of that engagement, and announced that they would in consequence con- 
 sider any act tending to a violation of it as a question of general interest. 
 The Sultan issued a firman for ameliorating the condition of his Christian 
 subjects, and communicated to the other Powers the purposes of the 
 firman ; emanating spontaneously from his sovereign will.' No right of 
 interference, it was distinctly specified, was given to the other Powers by 
 this concession on the Sultan's part. The article of the treaty which 
 referred to the Black Sea is of especial importance. ' The Black Sea is 
 neutralised ; its waters and its ports, thrown open to the mercantile 
 marine of every nation, are formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the 
 flag of war either of the Powers possessing its coasts or of any other 
 Power, with the exceptions mentioned in articles fourteen and nineteen.' 
 The exceptions only reserved the right of each of the Powers to have the 
 same number of small armed vessels in the Black Sea to act as a sort of 
 maritime police and to protect the coasts. The Sultan and the Emperor 
 engaged to establish and maintain no military or maritime arsenals in 
 that sea. The navigation of the Danube was thrown open. In exchange 
 for the towns restored to him, and in order more fully to secure the 
 navigation of the Danube, the Emperor consented to a certain rectification 
 of his frontier in Bessarabia, the territory ceded by Eussia to be annexed 
 to Moldavia under the suzerainty of the Porte. Moldavia and Wal- 
 lachia, continuing under the suzerainty of the Sultan, were to enjoy all 
 the privileges and immunities they already possessed under the guarantee 
 of the contracting Powers, but with no separate right of intervention in 
 their affairs. The existing position of Servia was assured. A convention 
 respecting the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus was made by all the 
 Powers. By this convention the Sultan maintained the ancient rule 
 prohibiting ships of war of foreign Powers from entering the Straits so 
 long as the Porte is at peace. During time of peace the Sultan engaged 
 to admit no foreign ships of war into the Bosphorus or the Dardanelles. 
 The Sultan reserved to himself the right as in former times of delivering 
 firmans of passage for light vessels under the flag of war employed in the 
 service of foreign Powers that is to say, of their diplomatic missions. A 
 separate convention as to the Black Sea between Eussia and Turkey 
 agreed that the contracting parties should have in that sea six light steam 
 
 VOL. I. E E
 
 418 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvin. 
 
 vessels of not more than 800 tons, and four steam or sailing vessels of not 
 more than 200 tons each. 
 
 Thus the controversies about the Christian provinces, the Straits, and 
 the Black Sea were believed to be settled. The great central business of 
 the Congress, however, was to assure the independence and the territorial 
 integrity of Turkey, now admitted to a place in the family of European 
 States. As it did not seem clear to those most particularly concerned in 
 bringing about this result that the arrangements adopted in full congress 
 had been sufficient to guarantee Turkey from the enemy they most 
 feared, there was a tripartite treaty afterwards agreed to between Eng- 
 land, France, and Austria. This document bears date in Paris April 15, 
 1856 ; by it the contracting parties guaranteed jointly and severally the 
 independence and integrity of the Ottoman empire, and declared that any 
 infraction of the general treaty of March 30 would be considered by them 
 as casus belli. It is probable that not one of the three contracting parties 
 was quite sincere in the making of this treaty. It appears to have been 
 done, at the instigation of Austria, much less for the sake of Turkey than 
 in order that she might have some understanding of a special kind with 
 some of the Great Powers, and thus avoid the semblance of isolation 
 which she now especially dreaded, having Russia to fear on the one side, 
 and seeing Itnly already raising its head on the other. England did not 
 particularly care about the tripartite treaty, which was pressed upon her, 
 and which she accepted trusting that she might never have to act upon it; 
 and France accepted it without any liking for it, probably without the 
 least intention of ever acting on it. 
 
 The Congress was also the means of bringing about a treaty between 
 England and France and Sweden. By this engagement Sweden under- 
 took not to cede to Russia any part of her present territories or any rights 
 of fishery ; and the two other Powers agreed to maintain Sweden by force 
 against aggression. 
 
 The Congress of Paris was remarkable too for the fact that the Pleni- 
 potentiaries before separating came to an agreement on the subject of the 
 ri<rht of search and the rules generally of maritime war. They agreed 
 to the four following declarations. ' First : privateering is and remains 
 abolished. Second : the neutral flag covers enemies' goods, with the ex- 
 ception of contraband of war. Third: neutral goorls, with the exception 
 of contraband of war, are not liable to capture under an enemy's flag. 
 Fourth : blockades in order to be binding must be effective ; that is to 
 gay, maintained bv a force sufficient really to prevent access to the enemy's 
 coast.' At the opening of the war Great Britain had already virtually 
 given up the claims she once made against neutrals, and which were indceJ
 
 186. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 untenable in the face of modern civilisation. She gladly agreed therefore 
 to ratify so far as her declaration went the doctrines which would abolish 
 lor ever the principle upon which those and kindred claims once rested. 
 It was agreed, however, that the rules adopted at the Congress of Paris 
 should only he binding on those States that had acceded or should accede 
 to them. The Government of the United States had previously invited 
 the great European Powers by a circular to assent t.o the broad doctrine 
 that free ships make free goods. At the instance of 'England it. was 
 answered that the adoption of that doctrine must be conditional on 
 America's renouncing the right of privateering. To this the United 
 States raised some difficulty, and the declarations of the Congress were 
 therefore made without America's assenting to them. 
 
 With many other questions too the Congress of Paris occupied itself. 
 At the instigation of Count Cavotir the condition of Italy was brought 
 under its notice ; and there can be no doubt that out of the Congress and 
 the part that Sardinia assumed as representative of Italian nationality 
 came the great succession of events which ended in the establishment of 
 a King of Italy in the palace of the Quirinal. The adjustment of the 
 condition of the Danubian Principalities too engaged much attention and 
 discussion, and a highly ingenious arrangement was devised for the 
 purpose of keeping those provinces from actual union, so that they might 
 be coherent enough to act as a rampart against Russia, without being so 
 coherent as to cause Austria any alarm for her own somewhat disjointed, 
 not to say distracted, political system. All these artificial and complex 
 arrangements presently fell to pieces, and the Principalities became in 
 course oi no very long time an independent State under a hereditary 
 prince. But for the hour it was hoped that the independence of Turkey 
 and the restriction of Russia, the security of the Christian provinces, the 
 neutrality of the Black Sea, and the closing of the Straits against war 
 vessels, had been bought by the Avar. 
 
 England lost some twenty-four thousand men in the war ; of whom hardly 
 a sixth fell in battle or died of wounds. Cholera and other diseases gave grim 
 account of the rest. Forty-one millions of money were added by the campaign 
 to the National Debt. Not much, it will be seen, was there in the way of 
 mere military glory to show for the cost. Our fleets had hardly any chance 
 of making their power felt. The ships of the Allies took Bomarsund in 
 the Baltic, and Kinburn in the Black Sea, and bombarded several places: 
 but the war was not one that gave a chance to a Nelson, even it a Nelson 
 had been at hand. Among the accidental and unpleasant consequences of 
 the. campaign it is worth mentioning the quarrel in which England became 
 involved with the. United States because of our Foreign Enlistment Act.. 
 
 K K 2
 
 420 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxvin 
 
 A.t the close of December, 1854, Parliament hurriedly passed an Act 
 authorising the formation of a Foreign Legion for service in the war, and 
 some Swiss and Germans were recruited who never proved of the slightest 
 service. Prussia and America both complained that the zeal of our recruit- 
 ing functionaries outran the limits of discretion and of law. One of our 
 consuls was actually put on trial at Cologne ; and America made a serious 
 complaint of the enlistment of her citizens. England apologised ; but the 
 United States were out of temper and insisted on sending our minister, 
 Mr. Crampton, away from Washington, and some little time passed before 
 the friendly relations of the two States were completely restored. 
 
 So the Crimean War ended. It was one of the unlucky accidents of 
 the hour that the curtain fell in the Crimea upon what may be considered 
 a check to the arms of England. There were not a few in this country 
 who would gladly have seen the peace negotiations fail, in order that Eng- 
 land might thereby have an opportunity of reasserting her military supre- 
 macy in the eyes of Europe. Never during the campaign, nor for a long 
 time before it, had England been in so excellent a condition for war, as 
 she was when the warlike operations suddenly came to an end. The cam- 
 paign had, indeed, only been a training time for us after the unnerving 
 relaxation of a long peace. We had learned some severe lessons from it; 
 and not unnaturally there were impatient spirits who chafed at the idea of 
 England's having no opportunity of putting these lessons to account. It 
 was but a mere chance that prevented us from accomplishing the capture 
 of the Redan, despite the very serious disadvantages with which we were 
 hampered in our enterprise as compared with our allies and their simul- 
 taneous operation. With just a little better generalship the Reclan would 
 have been taken ; as it was, even with the generalship that we had the 
 next attempt would not have been likely to fail. But the Russians aban- 
 doned Sebastopol, and our principal ally was even more anxious for peace 
 than the enemy ; and we had no choice but to accept the situation. The 
 war had never been popular in France. It had never had even that amount 
 of popularity which the French people accorded to their Emperor's later 
 enterprise, the campaign against Austria. Louis Napoleon had had all he 
 wanted. He had been received into the society of European sovereigns, 
 and he had made what the French public were taught to consider a brilliant 
 campaign. It is surprising to anyone who looks calmly back now on the 
 history of the Crimean War to find what an extravagant amount of credit 
 the French army obtained by its share in the operations. Even in this 
 country it was at the time an almost universal opinion that the French 
 succeeded in everything they tried ; that their system was perfect; flint 
 ilieir tactirs were beyond improvement; that they were a contrast to us in
 
 18. r )6. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 421 
 
 every respect,. Much of! this al>sunl delusion was no doubt the result, of a 
 condition of tilings among us which no reasonable Englishman would ex- 
 change for all the imaginary triumphs that a court, historiographer ever 
 celebrated. It was due to the iiict that our system was open to the criticism 
 of every peri that chose to assail it. Not a spot in our military organisation 
 escaped detection and exposure. Every detail was keenly criticised ; ever? 
 weakness was laid open to public observation. We invited all the world 
 to see where we were failing and what were the causes of our failure. 
 Our journals did the work for the military system of England that Matthew 
 Arnold says Goethe did for the political and social systems of Europe 
 struck its finger upon the weak places, ' and said thou rulest here and here.' 
 While the official and officious journals of the French empire were sound- 
 ing pagans to the honour o the Emperor and his successes, to his generals, 
 his officers, his commissariat, his transport service, his soldiers, his camp, 
 pioneers and all; our leading papers of all shades ot! politics were only 
 occupied in pointing out defects, and blaming those who did not instantly 
 remedy them. Unpatriotic conduct, it, may be said. Ay, truly, if the 
 conduct of the doctor be unfriendly when he tells that we have the symp- 
 toms of failing health, and warns us to take some measures for rest and 
 renovation. Some of the criticisms of the English press were undoubtedly 
 inaccurate and rash. But their general effect was bracing, healthful, suc- 
 cessful. Their immediate result was that which has already been indicated, 
 to leave the English army at the close of the campaign far better able to under- 
 take prolonged and serious operations o war than it had been at any time 
 during the campaign's continuance. For the effect of the French system 
 on the French army we should have to come down a little later in history 
 and study the workings of Imperialism as they displayed themselves in the 
 confidence, the surprises, and the collapse of 1S70. 
 
 Still there was a feeling of disappointment in this country at the close 
 of the war. This was partly due to dissatisfaction with the manner in 
 which we had carried on the campaign, and partly to distrust of its 
 political results. Our soldiers had done splendidly; but our generals and 
 our system had done poorly indeed. Only one first-class reputation of a 
 military order had come out of the war, and that w.?.3 by the common con- 
 sent of the world awarded to a Russian to General Todleben, the defender 
 of Sevastopol. No new name was made on our side or on that of the 
 French ; and some promising or traditional reputations were shuttered. 
 The political results of the war were to many minds equally unsatisfying. 
 We had gone into the enterprise for two things to restrain the aggressive 
 and aggrandising spirit of Russia, and to secure the integrity and indepen- 
 dence of Turkey as a Power capable of upholding herself with credit
 
 422 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. en. xxvni. 
 
 among the States of Europe. Events which happened more than twenty 
 years later will have to be studied before anyone can form a satisfactory 
 opinion as to the degree of success which attended each of these objects. 
 For the present, it is enough to say that there was not among thoughtful 
 minds at the time a very strong conviction of success either way. Lord 
 Aberdeen had been modest in his estimate of what the war would do. lie 
 had never had any heart in it, and he was not disposed to exaggerate its 
 beneficent possibilities. He estimated that it might perhaps secure peace 
 in the East of Europe for some twenty-five years. His modest expectation 
 was prophetic. Indeed, it a little overshot the mark. Twenty-two years 
 after the close of the Crimean campaign Russia and Turkey were at war 
 again. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 
 
 THE close of the Crimean War is a great landmark in the reign of Queen 
 Victoria, This, therefore, is a convenient opportunity to cast a glance 
 back upon the literary achievements of a period so markedly divided in 
 political interest from any that went before it. The reign of Queen 
 Victoria is the first in which the constitutional and Parliamentary system 
 of government came fairly and completely into recognition. It IB also the 
 reign which had the good fortune to witness the great modern develop- 
 ment in all that relates to practical invention, and more especially in the 
 application of science to the work of making communication rapid be- 
 tween men. On land and ocean, in air and under the sea, the history of 
 rapid travel and rapid interchange of message coincides with that of the 
 present reign. Such a reign ought to have a distinctive literature. So, 
 in truth, it has. Of course it is somewhat bold to predict, long and distinct 
 renown for contemporaries or contemporary schools. But it may perhaps 
 be assumed, without any undue amount of speculative venturesomene^s, 
 that the age of Queen Victoria will stand out in history as the period of a 
 literature as distinct from others as the age of Elizabeth or Anne ; although 
 not perhaps equal in greatness to the latter, and iar indeed below the 
 former. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign a great race of literary 
 men had come to a close. It is curious to note how sharply and com- 
 pletely the literature of Victoria separates itself from that of the era 
 whose heroes were Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth. Before Queen Vic- 
 toria came to the throne, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats were dead. 
 Wordsworth lived, indeed, for many years after; so did Southey and 
 Moore; and Savage Laridor died much later still. But Wordsworth,
 
 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 423 
 
 Southey, Moore, and Laridor had completed their literary work before 
 Victoria came to the throne. Not one of them added a cubit or an inch 
 to his intellectual stature from that time ; some of them even did work 
 which distinctly proved that their day was done. A new and fresh breath 
 was soon after breathed into literature. Nothing, perhaps, is more re- 
 markable about the better literature; of the ago of Queen Victoria than 
 its complete severance from the leadership of that which had gone before 
 it, and its evidence of a fresh and genuine inspiration. If, is a somewhat 
 curious fact, too, very convenient for the purposes of this history, that 
 the literature of Queen Victoria's time thus far divides itself clearly 
 enough into two parts. The poets, novelists, and historians who were 
 making their fame with the beginning of the reign had done all their 
 best work and made their mark before these later years, and were followed 
 by a new and different school, drawing inspiration from wholly different 
 sources, and challenging comparison as antagonists rather than disciples. 
 
 We speak now only of literature. In science the most remarkable 
 developments were reserved for the later years of the reign. We use the 
 words ' remarkable developments ' in the historical rather than in the 
 scientific sense. It would be hardly possible to overrate the benefits con- 
 ferred upon science and the world by some of the scientific men who 
 made the best part of their fame in the earlier years of the reign. Some 
 great names at once start to the memory. We think of Brewster, the 
 experimental philosopher, who combined in so extraordinary a degree tho 
 strictest severity of scientific argument and form with a freedom of fancy 
 and imagination which lent picturesqueness to all his illustrations and 
 invested his later writings especially with an indefinable charm. We 
 think of Michael Faraday, the chemist and electrician, who knew so well 
 how to reconcile the boldest researches into the heights and deeps of 
 science with the sincerest spirit of faith and devotion ; the memory of 
 whose delightful improvisations on the science he loved to expound must 
 remain for ever with all who had the privilege of hearing the unrivalled 
 lecturer deliver his annual discourses at the Royal Institution. It is not 
 likely that the name of Sir John Herschel, a gifted member of a gifted 
 family, would be forgotten by anyone taking even the hastiest glance at 
 the science of our time a family of whom it may truly be said, in slight 
 alteration of Wordsworth's praise of Milton, that their souls were with 
 the stars, and dwelt apart. Richard Owen's is, in another field of know- 
 ledge, a great renown. Owen had been called the Cuvier of England, 
 and the Newton of natural history, and there cannot be any doubt 
 that his researches and discoveries as an anatomist and palaeontologist 
 have marked a distinct era in the development of the study to which
 
 424 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CK. xxix. 
 
 he devoted himself. Hugh Miller, the author of ' The Old Red Sand- 
 stone ' and ' The Testimony of the Rocks,' the devotee and unfortunately 
 the martyr of scientific inquiry, brought a fresh and brilliant literary 
 ability, almost as untutored and spontaneous as that of his immortal 
 countryman Robert Burns, to bear on the exposition of the studies to 
 which he literally sacrificed his life. If, therefore, we say that the later 
 period of Queen Victoria's reign is more remarkable in science than the 
 former, it is not because we would assert that the men of this later da}' 
 contributed in richer measure to the development of human knowledge, 
 and especially of practical science, than those of the earlier time. But it 
 was in the later period that the scientific controversies sprang up and the 
 school arose which will be, in the historian's sense, most closely associated 
 with the epoch. The value of the labours of men like Owen and Fara- 
 day and Brewster is often to be appreciated thoroughly by scientific stu- 
 dents alone. What they have done is to be recorded in the history of 
 science rather than in the general and popular history of a day. But the 
 school of scientific thought Avhich Darwin founded and in which Huxley 
 and Tyndall taught is the subject of a controversy which may be set 
 down as memorable in the history of the world. All science and all 
 common life accepted with gratitude and without contest thG contributions 
 made to our knowledge by Faraday and Brewster ; but the theories ol 
 Darwin divided the scientific world, the religious world, and indeed all 
 society, into two hostile camps, and so became an event in history which 
 the historian can no more pass over than in telling of the grov/th of the 
 United States he could omit any mention of the great Civil War. Even 
 in dealing with the groAvth of science it is on the story of battles that the 
 attention of the outer Avorld must to the end of time be turned with the 
 keenest interest. This is, one might almost think, a scientific law in itself, 
 with which it would be waste of time to quarrel. 
 
 The earlier part of the reign was richer in literary genius than the 
 later has thus far been. Of course the dividing line which we draw is 
 loosely drawn, and may sometimes appear to be capricious. Some of 
 those who won their fame in the earlier part continued active workers, in 
 certain instances steadily adding to their celebrity, through the succeeding 
 years. The figure of Thomas Carlyle is familiar still to all who live in 
 the neighbourhood of Chelsea. It was late in the reign of Victoria that 
 Stuart Mill came out for the first time cm a public platform in London, 
 after a life divided between official work and the most various reading 
 and study ; a life divided too .between the seclusion of Blackheath and 
 the more poetic seclusion of Avignon, among the nightingales whose song 
 was afterwards so sweet to his dying cars. He came, strange and hhy.,
 
 175*4-1871. A HISTOliY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 into a world which know him only in his books, and to which the genti*; 
 mid grave demeanour of the shrinking and worn recluse scorned out ol 
 keeping with the fearless brain and heart which his career as a thinker 
 proved him to have. The reign had run for forty years when Harriet 
 Marti neau was taken from that beautiful and romantic homo in the bo.som 
 of the lake country to which her celebrity had drawn so many famous 
 visitors for so long a time. The renown of Dickens began with the reign, 
 and his death was sadly premature when he died in his quaint and charm- 
 ing home at Gad's Hill, in the country of FalstafF and Prince Hal, some 
 thirty-three years after. Mrs. Browning passed away very prematurely ; 
 but it might well be contended that the fame, or at least the popularity, of 
 Robert Browning belongs to this later part of the reign even though his 
 greatest work belongs to the earlier. The author of the most brilliant 
 and vivid book of travel known in our modern English, ' Eothen,' made a 
 sudden renown in the earlier part of the reign, and achieved a new and a 
 different sort of repute as the historian of the Crimean War during the 
 later part. Still, if we take the close of the Crimean War as an event 
 dividing the reign thus far into two parts, \ve shall find that there does 
 seem a tolerably clear division between the literature of the two periods. 
 We have therefore put iu this first part of our history the men and women 
 who had distinctly made their mark in these former years, and who would 
 have been famous if from that time out they had done nothing more. It 
 is with this division borne in mind that we describe the reign as more re- 
 markable in the literature of the earlier and in the science of these later 
 years. It is not rash to say that, although poets, historians and novelists 
 of celebrity came afterwards and may come yet, the literature of our time 
 gave its measure, as the French phrase is, in that earlier period. 
 
 Alike in its earlier passages and in its later the reign is rich in his- 
 torical labours. The names of-Grote, Macaulay and Carlyle occur at once 
 to the mind when we survey the former period. Mr. Grote's history 
 of Greece is indeed a monumental piece of work. It has all that patience 
 and exhaustive care which principally mark the German historians, and 
 it has an earnestness which is not to be found generally in the repre- 
 sentatives of what Carlyle has called the Dryasdust school. Grotc threw 
 himself: completely into the life and politics of Athens. It was said of 
 him with some truth that he entered so thoroughly into all the political 
 life of Greece as to become now and then the partisan of this or that 
 public man. His own practical acquaintance with politics was un- 
 doubtedly of great service to him. We have all grown somewhat tired of 
 hearing the words of Gibbon quoted in which he tells us that ' the disci- 
 pline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the
 
 426 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxix, 
 
 phalanx and the legion ; and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers 
 (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman 
 Empire.' Assuredly the practical knowledge of politics which Grote ac- 
 quired during the nine or ten years of his Parliamentary career was of much 
 service to the historian of Greece. It has been said indeed of him that he 
 never could quite keep from regarding the struggles of parties in Athens 
 as exactly illustrating the principles disputed between the Liberals and 
 the Tories in England. It does not seem to us, however, that his political 
 career affected his historical studies in any way, but by throwing greater 
 vitality and nervousness into his descriptions of Athenian controversies. 
 The difference between a man who has mingled anywhere in the active 
 life of politics and one who only knows that life from books and the talk 
 of others, is specially likely to show itself in such a study as Grote's his- 
 tory. His political training enabled Grote to see in the statesmen and 
 soldiers of the Greek peoples men and not trees walking. It taught him 
 how to make the dry bones live. Mr. Grote began life as what would 
 have been called in later years a Philosophical Radical. He was a close 
 friend of Stuart Mill, although he did not always agree with Mill in his 
 opinions. During his Parliamentary career he devoted himself for the 
 most part to the advocacy of the system of vote by ballot. He brought 
 forward a motion on the subject every session as Mr. Charles Villiers did 
 at one time for the repeal of the Corn Laws. He only gave up the House 
 of Commons in order that he might be free to complete his great history. 
 He did not retain all his radical opinions to the end of his life so thoroughly 
 as Mill did, but owned with a certain regret that in many ways his views 
 had undergone modification, and that he grew less and less ardent for 
 political change ; less hopeful, we may suppose, of the amount of good to be 
 done for human happiness and virtue by the spread and movement of 
 what are now called advanced opinions. It must be owned that it takes a 
 very vigorous and elastic mind to enable a man to resist the growth of 
 that natural and physical tendency towards conservatism or reaction which 
 comes with advancing years. It is as well for society on the whole that this 
 should be so, and that the elders as a rule should form themselves into a 
 guard to challenge very pertinaciously all the eager claims and demands 
 ibr change made by hopeful and restless youth. Xo one would more 
 readily have admitted the advantage that may come from this common law 
 of life than Grote's friend, Mill ; although Mill remained to the close of 
 his career as full of hope in the movement of liberal opinions as he had 
 Ix-en in his boyhood; still, to quote from some noble words of Schiller, 
 'reverencing as a man the dreams of his youth.' In his later years Grote 
 withdrew from all connection with active political controversy, and was
 
 1800-185'J. A HISTORY OF OUU OWN TIMES. 427 
 
 indeed curiously ignorant of the very hearings of Home of tin; greatest 
 questions around the -settlement of which the passions anil interests of 
 another hemisphere were brought into fierce and vast dispute. 
 
 We have already had occasion more than once to speak of Macaulay, the 
 great Parliamentary debater and statesman. It is the less necessary to say 
 much of him as an historian ; for Macaulay will be remembered rather u.s a 
 man who could do many things brilliantly than as the author of a history. 
 Yet Macaulay's 'History of England,' whatever its defects, is surdy entitled 
 to rank as a great work. We do not know whether grave scholars will regard 
 it as to the honour of the bonk or the reverse, that it was by far the most 
 popular historical essay ever produced by an Englishman. The successive 
 volumes of Macaulay's ' History of England,' were run after as the Wa- 
 verley Novels might have been at the zenith of their author's fame. 
 Living England talked for the time of nothing but Macaulay's 'England.' 
 Certainly history had never before in our country been treated in a style 
 so well calculated to render it at once popular, fascinating, and fashion- 
 able. Every chapter glittered with vivid and highly coloured description. 
 On almost every page was found some sentence of glowing eloquence or 
 gleaming antithesis, which at once lent itself to citation and repetition. 
 Not one word of it could have failed to convey its meaning. The whole 
 stood out in an atmospheiv clear, bright, and incapable of misty illusion as 
 that of a Swiss lake in summer. No shade or 1'aint haze of a doubt 
 appeared anywhere. The admirer of Macaulay had all the comfort in 
 his studies that a votary of the Roman Catholic Church may hax-e. lie had 
 an infallible guide. He had no need to vex himself with doubt, specula- 
 tion, or even conjecture. This absolute certainty about everything was, 
 beyond question, one great source of Macaulay's popularity. That reso- 
 lute conviction which readers of a more intellectual class arc especially 
 inclined to distrust has the same charm for the ordinary reader that it has 
 for children, who never care to hear any story if they suppose the narrator 
 does not know all about it in such a way as to render question or contra - 
 diction impossible. But although this was one of the causes of Macaulay's 
 popularity, it was not the most substantial cause. The brilliancy of his 
 style, the variety and aptness of his illustrations, and the animated 
 manner in which he contrived to set his ideas of men, places, and events 
 before the reader these were among the sources of success to which his 
 admirers must look with the greatest satisfaction. It is of late somewhat 
 the fashion to disparage Macaulay. lie was a popular idol so long that, in 
 the natural course of tilings, it has come to him to have his title to worship, 
 or even to faith, very generally questioned. To be unreasonably admired by 
 one generation is to incur the certainty of being unreasonably disparaged
 
 428 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. ru. XTIX. 
 
 by the next. The lenaeiioy of late is to assume that because Macaulay 
 was trilliant he must necessarily be superficial. But Macaulay was not 
 superficial. He was dogmatic ; he was full of prejudice ; he was in all 
 respects a better advocate than judge ; he was wanting in the calm im- 
 partial balancing faculty which an historian of the highest class ought to 
 have ; but he was not superficial. No man could make out a better and 
 a stronger case for any side of a controversy which he was led to espouse. 
 He was not good at drawing or explaining complex characters. He loved 
 indeed to picture contradictory and paradoxical characters. Nothing de- 
 lighted him more than to throw off an animated description of some great 
 person, who having been shown in the first instance to possess one set of 
 qualities in extreme prominence, was then shown to have a set of exactly 
 antagonistic qualities in quite equal prominence. This was not describing 
 a complex character. It was merely embodying a paradox. It was to 
 ' solder close,' as Timon of Athens says, ' impossibilities and make them 
 kiss.' There was something too much of trick about this, although it was 
 often done with so much power as to bewilder the better judgment of the 
 calmest reader. But where Macaulay happened to be right in his view of 
 a man or an event, he made his convictions clear with an impressiveness 
 and a brilliancy such as no modern writer has surpassed. The Avorld owes 
 him something for having protested, by precept and example, against the 
 absurd notion that the ' dignity of history ' required of historians to be 
 grave, pompous, and dull. He was not a Gibbon, but he wrote with all 
 Gibbon's delight in the picturesqueness of a subject, and Gibbon's resolve 
 to fascinate as well as to instruct his readers. Macaulay's history tries 
 too much to be an historical portrait gallery. The dangers of such a style 
 do not need to be pointed out. They are amply illustrated in Macaulay's 
 sparkling pages. But it is something to know that their splendid qualities 
 are far more conspicuous still than their defects. Perhaps very recent readers 
 of history too may feel disposed to be grateful to Macaulay for having 
 written without any profound philosophical theory to expound. He told 
 history like a stoiy. He warmed up as he went along, and grew en- 
 amoured, as a romancist does, of this character and angry with that other. 
 No doubt he frequently thus did harm to the trustworthiness of his narra- 
 tive where it had to deal Avith disputed questions, although he probably 
 enhanced the charms of his animated style. But he did not set out with 
 a mission to expound some theory as to a race or a tendency, and therefore 
 pledged beforehand to bend all facts of the physical, the political, and the 
 moral world to the duty of bearing witness for him and proclaiming the 
 truth of his message to mankind. 
 
 Macaulay was not exactly what the Germans would call a many-sided
 
 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 429 
 
 man. IIo never was anything but tlio one Macaulay in all IK; did or 
 attempted. But IK; did n groat many things well. Nothing that he ever 
 attempted was done badly. IIo was as successful in the composition of a 
 pretty valentine for a little girl as he was in his history, his essays, his 
 ' Lays of Ancient Rome,' and his Parliamentary speeches. In everything 
 he attempted he went very near to that success which true genius achieves. 
 In everything he just fell short of that achievement. But he so nearly 
 attained it that the reader who takes up one of Maeaulay's lio;iks or 
 speeches for the first time is almost sure to believe, under the influence of 
 the instant impression, that the genuine inspiration is there. Macaulay is 
 understood to have for a long time thought of writing ,1 romance. If he 
 had done so, we may feel sure that many intelligent readers would have 
 believed on the first perusal of it that it was almost on a level with Scott, 
 and only as the first impression gradually faded, and they came to read it 
 over again, have found out that Macaulay was not a Scott in fiction any 
 more than he was a Burke in elocnience or a Gibbon in history. He; filled 
 for a long time a larger space in the public mind than any oilier literary 
 man in England, and his style greatly affected literary men. But his 
 influence did not pierce deeply down into public feeling and thought as 
 that of one or two other men of the same period undoubtedly did, and 
 does still. lie did not impress the very soul of English feeling as 
 Mr. Carlyle, for example, has done. 
 
 No influence suffused the age from first to last more strongly than that, 
 of Thomas Carlyle. England's very way of thinking .vus at one time 
 profoundly affected by Carlyle. lie introduced the English people to the 
 great German authors, very much as Lessing had introduced the Germans 
 to Shakespeare and the old English ballads. Carlyle wrote in a style 
 which was so little like that ordinarily accepted as English, that the best 
 thing to be said for it was that it was not exactly German. At one time 
 it appeared to be so completely moulded on that of Jean Paul Ilichter, 
 that not a few persons doubted whether the new comer really had any 
 ideas of his own. But Carlyle soon proved that he could think for him- 
 self; and he very often proved it by thinking wrong. There was in him 
 a strong, deep vein of the poetic. Long after he had evidently settled 
 down to be a writer of prose and nothing else, it still seemed to many that 
 his true sphere was poetry. The grim seriousness which he had taken 
 from his Scottish birth and belongings was made hardly less grim by the 
 irony which continually gleamed or scowled through it. Truth and force 
 were the deities of: Carlyle's especial worship. ' The eternal verities ' sat 
 on the top of his Olympus. To act out the truth in life and make others 
 act it out would require some force more strong, ubiquitous, and pene-
 
 430 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxre. 
 
 trating tl an we can well obtain from the slow deliberations of an ordinal y 
 Parliament, with its debates and divisions and everlasting formulas. 
 Therefore, to enforce his eternal verities, Carlyle always preached up and 
 yearned fcr the strong man, the poem in action, whom the world in our 
 day had not found, and perhaps could not appreciate. If this man were 
 found, it would be his duty and his privilege to drill us all as in some vast 
 camp, and compel us to do the right thing to his dictation. It cannot be 
 doubted that this preaching of the divine right of force had a serious and 
 sometimes a very detrimental effect upon the public opinion of England, 
 It degenerated often into affectation, alike with the teacher and the dis- 
 ciples. But the influence of Carlyle in preaching earnestness and truth, 
 in art and letters and everything else, had a healthy and very remarkable . 
 effect entirely outside the regions of the moralist, who in this country at 
 least has always taught the same lesson. It is not probable that individual 
 men were made much more truthful in England by Carlyle's glorification of 
 the eternal verities than they would have been without it. But his influence 
 on letters and art was peculiar, and was not evanescent. Carlyle is dis- 
 tinctly the founder of a school of history and a school of art. In the 
 meanwhile we may regard him simply as a great author, and treat his 
 books as literary studies and not as gospels. Thus regarded, we shall find 
 that he writes in a style which every sober critic would feel bound to 
 Condemn, but which, nevertheless, the soberest critic is forced continually, 
 despite of himself and his rules, to admire. For, out of the strange jargon 
 which he seem' to have deliberately adopted, Carlyle has undoubtedly 
 constructed a wonderfully expressive medium in which to speak his words 
 of remonstrance and admonition. It is a mannerism, but a mannerism 
 into which a great deal of the individuality of the man seems to have 
 entered. It is not wholly affectation or superficiality. Carlyle's own soul 
 seems to speak out in it more freely and strenuously than it would in tin- 
 ordinary English of society and literature. No tongue, says Kichter, is 
 eloquent save in its own language ; and this strange language which he has 
 made for himself does really appear to be the native tongue of Carlyle's 
 powerful and melancholy eloquence. Carlyle is endowed with a marvel- 
 lous power of depicting stormy scenes and rugged daring natures. At 
 times strange wild piercing notes of the pathetic are heard through hia 
 strenuous and fierce bursts of eloquence like the wail of a clarion thrilling 
 between the blasts of a storm. His history of the French Revolution is 
 history read by lightning. Of this remarkable book John Stuart Mill 
 supplied the principal material ; for Will at one time thought of writing a 
 history of the Revolution himself, but, giving up the idea, placed the 
 materials he had collected at the service of Carlyle. Carlyle used the
 
 18-87. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMK8. 431 
 
 materials in his own way. !!* is indebted to no one for his method of 
 making up his history. With all its defects, the book is one of the very 
 finest :>ur age has produced. Its characters stand out like portraits by 
 Rembrandt. Its crowds live and move. The picture of Mirabeau is 
 worthy of the hand of the great German poet who gavo us Wallcnstein. 
 But Carlyle's style lias introduced into this country a thoroughly false 
 method of writing history. It is a method which lias little regard for the 
 ' dry light' which Bacon approved. It works under the varying glare of 
 coloured lights. Its purpose is to express scorn of one set of ideas and 
 men, and admiration of another. Given the man we admire, then all his 
 doings and ways must be admirable ; and the historian proceeds to work 
 this principle out. Carlyle's Mirabeau is as truly a creature of romance 
 as the Monte Christo of Dumas. This way of going to work became even 
 more apparent, as the mannerisms became more incessant, in Carlyle's 
 later writings in the ' Frederick the Great,' for example. The reader 
 dares not trust such history. It is of little value as an instructor in the 
 lessons of the limes and events it deals with. It only tells us what 
 Carlyle thought of the times and the events, and the men who were the 
 chief actors in them. Nor docs Carlyle bequeath many new ideas to the 
 world which he stirred by his stormy eloquence. That falsehood cannot 
 prevail over truth in the end, nor simulacra do the work of realities, is not, 
 after all, a lesson which earth can be said to have waited for up to the 
 nineteenth century and the coming of Carlyle ; and yet it would be hard 
 to point to any other philosophical outcome of Mr. Carlyle's teaching. 
 His value is in his eloquence, his power, his passion, and pathos; his 
 stirring and lifelike pictures of human character, whether faithful to the 
 historical originals or not; and the vein of poetry which runs through all 
 his best writings, and sometimes makes even the least sympathetic reader 
 believe that he has to do with a genuine poet. 
 
 In strongest contrast to the influence of Carlyle may be set the 
 influence of Mill. Except where the professed teachers of religious creeds 
 are concerned, there can be found no other man in the reign of Victoria 
 who had anything like the influence over English thought that Mill and 
 Carlyle possessed. Mill was a devoted believer in the possibilities of 
 human nature and of liberty. If Rousseau was the apostle of affliction. 
 Mill was surely the apostle of freedom, lie believed that human society 
 might be brought to something not far removed from perfection by the 
 influence of education and of freedom acting on the best impulses and 
 disciplining the emotions of men and women. Mill was a strange blend- 
 ing of political economist and sentimentalist. It was not altogether in 
 humorous exaggeration that somebody said he was Adam Smith and
 
 132 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxrs. 
 
 Petrarch in one. The curious seclusion in which lie was brought up by 
 nis father, the wonderful discipline of study to which, in his very infancy 
 he was subjected, would have made something strange and striking out of 
 a commonplace nature ; and Mill was in any case a man of genius. There 
 was an antique simplicity and purity about his life which removed him 
 altogether from the ways of ordinary society. But the defect of his 
 teaching as an ethical guide was that he made too little allowance for the 
 influence of ordinary society. He always seemed to act on the principle 
 that with true education and noble example the most commonplace men 
 could be persuaded to act like heroes, and to act like heroes always. The 
 great service which he rendered to the world in his Political Economy and 
 his system of Logic is of course independent of his controverted theories 
 and teachings. These works would, if they were all he had written, place 
 him in the very front rank of English thinkers and instructors. But these 
 only represent half of his influence on the public opinion of his time. 
 His faith in the principle of human liberty led him to originate the move- 
 ment for what is called the emancipation of women. Opinions will doubt- 
 less long differ as to the advantages of the movement, but there can be no 
 possible difference of judgment as to the power and fascination of Mill's 
 advocacy and the influence he exercised. He did not succeed in his 
 admirable essay ' On Liberty ' in establishing the rule or principle by 
 which men may decide between the right of free expression of opinion 
 and the right of authority to ordain silence. Probably no precise boundary 
 line can ever be drawn ; and in this, as in so much else, lawmakers raid 
 peoples must be content with a compromise. But Mill's is at least a noble 
 plea for the fullest possible liberty of utterance ; and he has probably 
 carried the argument as far as it ever can be carried. There never was a 
 more lucid and candid reasoner. The most difficult and abstruse questions 
 became clear by the light of his luminous exposition. Something too of 
 human interest and sympathy became infused into the most seemingly arid 
 discussions of political economy by the virtue of his emotional and half 
 poetic nature. It was well said of him that he reconciled political 
 economy with human feeling. His style was clear as light. Mill, said 
 one of his critics, lives in light. Sometimes his language rose to a noble 
 and dignified eloquence ; here and there are passages of a grave, keen 
 irony. Into the questions of religious belief which arise in connection 
 with his works it is no part of our business to enter ; but it may bo 
 remarked that his latest writings seem to show that his views w r ere under- 
 going much modification in his closing years. His opponents would have 
 allowed as readily as his supporters that no man could have been more 
 sincerely inspired with a desire to arrive at the truth ; and that none could
 
 1802-1876. A HISTORY OK OUR OWN T1MK8. 433 
 
 he more resolute to follow the course which his conscience told him to be 
 right. He carried this resolute principle into his warmest controversies, 
 and it was often remarked that lie usually began hy stating the case of the 
 adversary better than the adversary could have done it for himself. 
 Applying to his own character the same truthful method of inquiry which 
 he applied to others, Mill lias given a very accurate description of one at 
 least of the qualities by which he was able to accomplish so much. He 
 tells us in his Autobiography that he had from an early period considered 
 that the most useful part he could take in the domain of thought was that 
 of an interpreter of original thinkers and mediator between them and the 
 public. ' I had always a humble opinion of my own powers as an original 
 thinker, except in abstract science (logic, metaphysics, and the theoretic 
 principles of political economy and politics), but thought myself much 
 superior to most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn 
 from everybody ; as I found hardly anyone who made such a point of 
 examining what was said in defence of all opinions, however new or how- 
 ever old, in the conviction that even if they were errors there might be a 
 substratum of truth underneath them, ar.d that in any case the discovery 
 of what it was that made them plausible would be a benefit to truth.' 
 This was not assuredly Mill's greatest merit, but it was perhaps his most 
 peculiar quality. He was an original thinker, despite his own sincere 
 disclaimer; but he founded no new system. He could be trusted to 
 examine and expound any system with the most perfect fairness and 
 candour ; and, even where it was least in harmony with his own ideas, to 
 do the fullest justice to every one of its claims. 
 
 Harriet Martineau's career as a woman of letters and a teacher began 
 indeed before the reign of Queen Victoria, but it was carried on almost 
 without interruption during nearly forty years of the reign. She was 
 political economist, novelist, historian, biographer, and journalist ; and in 
 no path did she fail to make her mark. Few women could have turned 
 to the occupations of a political writer under greater physical disadvantages ; 
 and no man in this line of life, however well furnished by nature witli 
 physical and intellectual qualifications for success, could have done better 
 work. She wrote some exquisite little stories, and one or two novels vi 
 more ambitious character. It is praise enough to give them when we say 
 that, although fiction certainly was not work for which she was most 
 especially qualified, yet what she did seems to be destined to live and hold 
 a place in our literature. She was, so far as we know, the only English 
 woman who ever achieved distinct and great success as a writer of leading 
 articles for a daily newspaper. Her strong prejudices and dislikes pre 
 vent her from being always regarded as a trustworthy historian. Her 
 
 VOL. I. F F
 
 434 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxix. 
 
 ' History of the Thirty Years' Peace ' for it may be regarded as 
 wholly hers, although Charles Knight began it is a work full of vigorous 
 thought and clear description, with here and there passages of genuine 
 eloquence. But it is marred in its effect as a trustworthy narrative by 
 the manner in which the authoress yields here and there to inveterate and 
 wholesale dislikes ; and sometimes, though not so often or so markedly, to 
 an over-wrought hero-worship. Miss Martineau had to a great extent an 
 essentially masculine mind. She was often reproached with being unfemi- 
 nine ; and assuredly she would have been surprised to hear that there 
 was anything womanish in her way of criticising public events and men. 
 Yet in reading her ' History ' one is sometimes amused to find that that 
 partisanship which is commonly set down as a specially feminine quality 
 affects her estimate of a statesman. Hers is not by any means the Car- 
 lylean way of starting with a theory and finding all virtue and glory in the 
 man who seems to embody it, and all baseness and stupidity in his oppo- 
 nents. But when she takes a dislike to a particular individual, she seems 
 to assume that where he was wrong he must have been wrong of set malign 
 purpose, and that where he chanced to be in the right it was in mistake, 
 and in despite of his own greater inclination to be in the wrong. It is 
 fortunate that these dislikes are not many, and also that they soon show 
 themselves, and therefore cease to be seriously misleading. In all other 
 respects the book well deserves careful study. The life of the woman is a 
 study still more deeply interesting. Others of her sex there were of 
 greater genius, even in her own time; but no Englishwoman ever followed 
 with such perseverance and success a career of literary and political labour. 
 ' The blue -peter has long been flying at my foremast, and, now that I 
 am in my ninety-second year, I must soon expect the signal for sailing.' 
 la this quaint and cheery way Mary Somerville, many years after the 
 period at which we have now arrived in this work, described her condition 
 and her quiet waiting for death. No one surely could have better earned 
 the right to die by the labours of a long life devoted to the education and 
 the improvement of her kind. Mary Somerville has probably no rival 
 among women as a scientific scholar. Her summary of Laplace's ' Me- 
 canique Celeste,' her treatise on the ' Connection of the Physical Sciences, 'and 
 her 'Physical Geography,' would suffice to place any .student, man or woman, 
 in the foremost rank of scientific expounders. The 'Physical Geography' is 
 the only one of Mrs. Soinerville's remarkable works which was published 
 in the reign of Queen Victoria ; but the publication of the other two pre- 
 ceded the opening of the reign by so short a time, and her career and her 
 fame so entirely belong to the Victorian period, that, even if the 'Physical 
 Geography ' had never been published, she must be included in this history.
 
 1780-1872. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMK8. 4'i' 
 
 'I was intensely ambitious,' Mrs. Somcrville says of herself in in-r earlier 
 days, 'to excel in something; for I Celt in my own breast that women wen 
 capable of taking a higher place in creation than that assigned lo them in 
 my early days, which was very low.' It is not exaggeration to say that 
 Mrs. Somerville distinctly raised the world's estimate of woman's capacity 
 lor the severest and the lofliest scientific pursuits. She possessed the most 
 extraordinary power of concentration, amounting to an entire absorption 
 in the subject which she happened to be studying, to the exclusion of all 
 disturbing sights and sounds. She had in a supreme degree that which 
 Carlyle calls the first quality of genius, an immense! capacity for taking 
 trouble. She had also, happily for herself, an immense! capacity for finding 
 enjoyment in almost everything : in new places, people, and thoughts ; in 
 the old familiar scenes and friends and associations. Hers was a noble, 
 calm, fully-rounded life. She worked as steadfastly and as eagerly in her 
 scientific studies as Harriet Martincau did with her economies and her 
 politics: but she had a more cheery, less sensitive, loss eager and im- 
 patient nature than Harriet Martincau. She was aide to pursue her most 
 intricate calculations after she had passed her ninetieth year ; and one of 
 her chief regrets in dying was that she should not ' live to see the di>tanco 
 of the earth from the sun determined by the transit of Venus, and the 
 source of the most renowned of rivers, the discovery of which will im- 
 mortalise the name of Dr. Livingstone.' 
 
 The paths of the two poets who first sprang into fame in the present 
 reign are strangely remote from each other. Mr. Tennyson and Mr. 
 Browning are as unlike in style and choice of subject, and indeed in the 
 whole spirit of their poetry, as Wordsworth and Byron. Mr. Tennyson 
 deals with incident and picturesque form, and graceful legend, and with 
 so much of doubt and thought and yearning melancholy as would belong 
 to a refined and cultured intellect under no greater stress or strain than 
 the ordinary chances of life among educated Englishmen might be expected 
 to impose, lie has revived with great success the old Arthurian legends, 
 and made them a part of the living literature of England. But the 
 knights and ladies whom lie paints arc refined, graceful, noble, without 
 roughness, without wild or at all events complex and distracting passion.-. 
 It may perhaps be said that Tennyson has taken for his province ail the 
 beauty, all the nobleness, all the feeling that lie near to or on the surface 
 of life and of nature. His object might seem to be that which Lessing 
 declared the true object of all art, ' to delight; ' but it is to delignt in a 
 somewhat narrower sense than was the meaning of Lessing. Beauty, 
 melancholy, and repose are the elements of Tennyson's poetry. There is 
 uo storm, no conflict, no complication. Mr. Browning, on the other hand, 
 
 K F 2
 
 436 A HISTORY Of OUE OWN TIMES. OH. xxix 
 
 delights in perplexed problems of character and life ; in studying the 
 effects of strange contrasting forces of passion coming into play under 
 peculiar and distracting conditions. All that lies beneath the surface ; all 
 that is out of the common track of emotion ; all that is possible, that is poeti- 
 cally conceivable, but ^Jiat the outer air and the daily walks of life never 
 see, this is what specially attracts Mr. Browning. In Tennyson a knight of 
 King Arthur's mythical court has the emotions of a polished English gentle- 
 man of our day, and nothing more. Mr. Browning would prefer, in treat- 
 ing of a polished English gentleman of our day, to exhibit him under some 
 conditions which should draw out in him all the strange elementary passions 
 and complications of emotion that lie far down in deeps below the surface of 
 the best ordered civilisation. The tendency of the one poet is naturally 
 to fall now and then into the sweetly insipid ; of the other to wander 
 away into the tangled regions of the grotesque. It is perhaps only natu- 
 ral that under such conditions the one poet should be profoundly con- 
 cerned for beauty of form, and the latter almost absolutely indifferent to 
 it. No poet has more finished beauty of style and exquisite charm of 
 melody than Tennyson. None certainly can be more often wanting in 
 *race ef form and delight of soft sound than Mr. Browning. There are 
 /nany passages and even many poems of Browning which show that the 
 poet could be melodious if he would ; but he seems sometimes ;is if he 
 took a positive delight in perplexing the reader's ear with harsh untuneful 
 sounds. Mr. Browning commonly allows the study of the purely psycho- 
 logical to absorb too much of his moods and of his genius. It has a 
 fascination for him which he is seemingly unable to resist. He makes of 
 his poems too often mere searchings into strange deeps of human character 
 and human error. He seldom abandons himself altogether to the inspi- 
 ration of the poet ; he hardly ever deserves the definition of the minstrel 
 given in Goethe's ballad who ' sings but as the song-bird sings.' More- 
 over, Mr. Browning has an almost morbid taste for the grotesque ; he is 
 not unfrequently a sort of poetic Callot. It has to be added that Mr. 
 Browning is seldom easy to understand, and that there are times when he 
 is only to be understood at the expense of as much thought and study as 
 one might give to a controverted passage in an ancient author. This is a 
 defect of art, and a very serious defect. The more devoted of Mr. Brown- 
 ing's admirers will tell us no doubt that the poet is not bound to supply 
 us with brains as well as poetry, and that if we cannot understand what 
 lie says it is the fault simply of our stupidity. But an ordinary man who 
 tinds that he can understand Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Words- 
 worth, Byron and Keats, without any trouble, may surely be excused if 
 he does not set down his difficulty about somo of Browning's poems
 
 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4:>7 
 
 wholly to the account of his own dulncss. It may well lie doubted 
 whether there is any idea so subtle that, if: the poet can actually realise it 
 in his own mind clearly for himself, the English language will not IHJ 
 found capable of expressing it with suflicient clearness. The language 
 has been made to do this for the most refined reasonings of philosophical 
 schools, for transcendentalists and utilitarians, for psychologists and meta- 
 physicians. No intelligent person feels any difficulty in understanding 
 what Mill or Herbert Spencer or Huxley means; and it can hardly be 
 said that the ideas Mr. Browning desires to convey to his readers are more 
 difficult of exposition than some of those which the authors we name have 
 contrived to set out with a white light of clearness all round them. The 
 plain truth is that Mr. Browning is a great poet in spite of some of the 
 worst defects that ever stood between a poet and popularity. He is a 
 great poet by virtue of his commanding genius, his fearless imagination, 
 his penetrating pathos. He strikes an iron harpstring. In certain of his 
 moods his poetry is like that of the terrible lyre in the weird old Scottish 
 ballad, the lyre that was made of the murdered maiden's breast-bone, and 
 which told its fearful story in tones ' that would ir.elt a heart of stone.' 
 In strength and depth of passion and pathos, in wild humour, in emotion 
 o every kind, Mr. Browning is much superior to Mr. Tennyson. The 
 Poet Laureate is the completcr man. Mr. Tennyson is beyond doubt the 
 most complete of the poets of Queen Victoria's time. No one else has the 
 same combination of melody, beauty of description, culture and intel- 
 lectual power. He has sweetness and strength in exquisite combination. 
 If a just balance of poetic powers were to be the crown of a poet, then 
 undoubtedly Mr. Tennyson must be proclaimed the greatest English poet 
 of our time. The reader's estimate of Browning and Tennyson will 
 probably be decided by his predilection lor the higher effort or for the 
 more perfect art. Browning's is surely the higher aim in poetic art; but 
 of the art which he essays Tennyson is by far the completer master. 
 Tennyson has undoubtedly thrown away much of his sweetness and his 
 exquisite grace of form on mere triflings and pretty conceits; and perhaps 
 as a retribution those poems of his which are most familiar in the popular 
 mouth are just those which least do justice to his genuine strength and 
 intellect. The cheap sentiment of ' Lady Clara Vere de Vere,' the yet 
 cheaper pathos of ' The May Queen,' are in the minds of thousands the 
 choicest representation of the genius of the poet who wrote ' In Memoriam 
 and the ' Morte d' Arthur.' Mr. Browning, on the other hand, has chosen 
 to court the approval of his time on terms of such disadvantage as an 
 orator might who insisted in addressing an assemblage in some tongue 
 which they but imperfectly understood. It is the fault of Mr. Browning
 
 438 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxix. 
 
 himself if lie has for his only audience and admirers men and women of 
 culture, and misses altogether that broad public audience to which most 
 poets have chosen to sing, and which all true poets, one would think, 
 must desire to reach with their song. It is, on the other hand, assuredly 
 Mr. Tennyson's fault if he has by his too frequent condescension to the 
 drawing-room, and even the young ladies' school, made men and women 
 of culture forget for a moment his best things, and credit him with no 
 higher gift than that of singing ' virginibus puerisque.' One quality 
 ought to be mentioned as common to these two poets who have so little 
 else in common. They are both absolutely faithful to nature and truth 
 in their pictures of the earth and its scenes and seasons. Almost all the 
 great poets of the past age, even including Wordsworth himself, were now 
 and then content to generalise nature ; to take some things for granted ; 
 to use their memory, or the eyes of others, rather than their own eyes, 
 when they had to describe changes on leaf, or sky, or water. It is the 
 characteristic of Tennyson and Browning that they deal with nature in a 
 spirit of the most faithful loyalty. Not the branch of a tree, nor the cry 
 of a bird, nor the shifting colours on sea or sky, will be found described 
 on their pages otherwise than as the eye sees for itself at the season of 
 which the poet tells. In reading Tennyson's description of woodland and 
 forest scenes one might almost fancy that he can catch the exact pecu- 
 liarities of sound in the rustling and moaning of each separate tree. In 
 some of Mr. Browning's pictures of Italian scenery every detail is so 
 perfect that many a one journeying along an Italian road and watching 
 the little mouse-coloured cattle as they drink at the stream may for the 
 moment almost feel uncertain whether he is looking on a page of living 
 reality or recalling to memory a page from the author of ' The King and 
 the Bonk.' The poets seem to have returned to the fresh simplicity of a 
 far distant acre of poetry, when a man described exactly what he saw, and 
 was put to describing it because he saw it. In most of the intermediate 
 times a poet describes because some other poet has described before, and 
 lias said that in nature there are such and such beautiful things which every 
 true poet must, see, and is bound to acknowledge accordingly in his verse. 
 These two are the greatest of our poets in the earlier part of the reign; 
 indeed in the reign early or late so far. But there are other poets also of 
 whom AVC must take account. Mrs. BroAvning has often been described as 
 the greatest poetess of Avhom Ave knoAv anything since Sappho. This de- 
 scription, however, seems to carry Avith it, a much higher degree of praise 
 than it really bears. It has to be remembered that there is no great poetess 
 of Avhom Ave know anything from the time of Sappho to that of Mrs. 
 Browning. In England w<> have hardly had any woman but Mrs. Browning
 
 I809~18fll. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 430 
 
 alono who really deserves to rank with poets. She takes ;i place altogether 
 different from that of any Mrs. Ilemans or such singer of sweet, mild, and 
 innocent note. Mrs. Browning would rank highly among poets without 
 any allowance being claimed for her sex. But estimated in this way, which 
 assuredly she would have chosen for herself, she can hardly ho admitted to 
 stand with the foremost even of our modern day. She is one of the most 
 sympathetic of poets. She speaks to the hearts of numbers of readers who 
 think Tennyson all too sweet, smooth, and trivial, and Robert Hi-owning 
 harsh and rugged. She speaks especially to the emotional in Avoman. In 
 all moods when men or women are distracted by the bewildering conditions 
 of life, when they feel themselves alternately dazzled by its possibilities and 
 baffled by its limitations, the poems of Elizabeth Browning ought to find 
 sympathetic ears. But the poems are not the highest which merely appeal 
 to our own moods and echo our own plaints; and there was not much of 
 creative genius in Mrs. Browning. Her poems are often but a prolonged 
 sob; a burst of almost hysterical remonstrance or entreaty. It must be 
 owned, however, that the egotism of emotion has seldom found such 
 exquisite form of outpouring as in her so-called ' Sonnets from the Portu- 
 guese; ' and that what the phraseology of a school would call the emotion 
 of 'altruism' has rarely been given forth in tones of such piercing pathos 
 as in ' The Cry of the Children.' 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold's reputation was made before this earlier period 
 had closed. lie is a maker of such exquisite and thoughtful verse that it 
 is hard sometimes to question his title to be considered a genuine poet. 
 On the other hand, it is likely that the very grace and culture and thought- 
 fulness of his style inspire in many the first doubt of his claim to the name 
 of poet. Where the art is evident and elaborate, we are all too apt to 
 assume that it is all art and not genius. Mr. Arnold is a sort of miniature 
 Goethe; we do not know that his most ardent admirers could demand a 
 higher praise for him, while it is probable that the description will suggest 
 exactly the intellectual peculiarities which lead so many to deny him a 
 place with the really inspired singers of his day. Of the three men whom 
 we have named we should be inclined to say that Mr. Arnold made the 
 very most of his powers, and Mr. Browning the very least. Mr. Arnold 
 is a critic as well as a poet : there arc many who relish him more in the 
 critic than in the poet. In literary criticism his judgment is refined, and 
 his aims are always high if his range be not very wide; in politics and 
 theology he is somewhat apt to be at once fastidious and fantastic. 
 
 The ' Soi;g of the Shirt' would give Thomas I fond a technical right, 
 if he had none other, to be classed as a poet of the reign of Queen Victoria. 
 The ' Song of the Shirt' wns published in Pinirh when the reign was well
 
 440 A HISTORY OF OUE OWX TIMES. on. xxix. 
 
 on; and after it, appeared 'The Bridge of Sighs'; and no two of Hood's 
 poems hare done more to make him famous. lie was n genuine though 
 not a great poet, in whom humour was most properly to be denned as 
 Thackeray has defined it the blending of love and wit. The ' Song of 
 the Shirt' and the 'Bridge of Sighs' made themselves a kind of monu- 
 mental place in English sympathies. The ' Plea of the Midsummer Fairies ' 
 was written several years before. It alone would have made for its author 
 a reputation. The ballad of ' Fair Inez ' is almost perfect in its way. The 
 name of Sir Henry Taylor must be included with the poets of this reign, 
 although his best work was done before the reign began. In his work, 
 clear strong intelligence prevails more than the emotional and the sensuous. 
 He makes himself a poet by virtue of intellect and artistic judgment ; for 
 there really do seem some examples of a poet being made and not born. 
 We can hardly bring Procter among the Victorian poets. Macaulay's 
 ringing verses are rather the splendid and successful tours de force of a 
 clever man than the genuine lyrics of a poet. Arthur dough was a rnan 
 of rare promise, whose lamp was extinguished all too soon. Philip James 
 Bailey startled the world by his ' Festus,' and for a time made people believe 
 that a great new poet was coming; but the impression did not last, and 
 Bailey proved to be little more than the comet of a season. A spasmodic 
 school which sprang up after the success of ' Festus,' and which was led 
 by a brilliant young Scotchman, Alexander Smith, passed away in a spasm 
 as it came, and is now almost forgotten. ' Orion,' an epic poem by Richard 
 II. Home, made a very distinct mark upon the time. Home proved him- 
 self to be a sort of Landor manque or perhaps a connecting link between 
 the style of Landor and that of Browning. The earlier part of the reign 
 was rich in singers ; but the names and careers of most of them would 
 serve rather to show that the poetic spirit was abroad, and that it sought 
 expression in all manner of forms, than that there were many poets to 
 dispute the place with Tennyson and Browning. It is not necessary here to 
 record a list of mere names. The air was filled with the voices of minor 
 singers. It was pleasant to listen to their piping, and the general effect 
 may well be commended ; but it is not necessary that the names of all the 
 performers in an orchestra should be recorded for the supposed gratification 
 of a posterity which assuredly would never stop to read the list. 
 
 Thirty-six years have passed away since Mr. Rusldn leaped into the 
 literary arena, with a spring as bold and startling as that of Kean on the 
 Kernble-haunted stage. The little volume, so modest in its appearance 
 and self-sufficient in its tone, which the author defiantly flung down like a 
 gage of battle before the world, was entitled, 'Modern Painters: their 
 superiority in the art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters:
 
 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 441 
 
 by a Graduate of Oxford.' It was a challenge to established beliefs and 
 prejudices; and the challenge was delivered in the tone of one who felt 
 confident that he could make good his words against any and all opponents. 
 If there was one thing that more than another seemed to have been fixed 
 and rooted in the English mind, it was that Claude and one or two others 
 of the old masters possessed the secret of landscape painting. When, there- 
 fore, a bold young dogmatist involved in one common denunciation 
 ' Claude, Caspar Poussin, Salvator Uosa, Kuyadael, Paul Potter, Canaletto, 
 and the various Van-somethings and Koek-somethings, more especially and 
 malignantly those who have libelled the sea,' it was no wonder that affronted 
 authority raised its indignant voice and thundered at him. Affronted 
 authority, however, gained little by its thunder. The young Oxford 
 Graduate possessed, along with genius and profound conviction, an im- 
 perturbable and magnificent self-conceit against which the surges of angry 
 criticism dashed themselves in vain. Mr. Kuskin sprang into literary life 
 simply as a vindicator of the fame and genius of Turner. But as he went 
 on with his task he found, or at least he convinced himself, that the vindica- 
 tion of the great landscape painter was essentially a vindication of all true 
 art. Still further proceeding with his self-imposed task, lie persuaded 
 himself that the cause of true art was identical with the cause of truth, 
 and that truth, from Ruskin's point of view, enclosed in the same rules 
 and principles all the morals, all the science, industry, and daily business 
 of life. Therefore, from an art-critic he became a moralist, a political 
 economist, a philosopher, a statesman, a preacher anything, everything 
 that human intelligence can impel a man to be. All that he has written 
 since his first appeal to the public has been inspired by this conviction : 
 that an appreciation of the truth in art reveals to him who has it the 
 truth in everything. This belief has been the source of Mr. Kuskin's 
 greatest successes and of his most complete and ludicrous failures. It 
 has made him the admiration of the world one week and the object of 
 its placid pity or broad laughter the next. A being who could be Joan of 
 Arc to-day and Voltaire's Pucelle to-morrow would hardly exhibit a 
 stronger psychical paradox than the eccentric genius of Mr. Ruskin some- 
 times illustrates. But in order to do him justice, and not to regard him 
 as a mere erratic utterer of eloquent contradictions, poured out on the 
 impulse of each moment's new freak of fancy, we must always bear in 
 mind the fundamental faith of the man. Extravagant as this or that 
 doctrine may be, outrageous as to-day's contradiction of yesterday's asser- 
 tion may sound, yet the whole career is consistent with its essential prin- 
 ciples and beliefs. It may be, fairly questioned whether Mr. Ruskin has 
 any great qualities but his eloquence and his true, honest love of nature.
 
 142 A HISTORY OF OUR OWX TIMES. CH. xxix, 
 
 As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was fashionably 
 languid and the other part only too busy and greedy, and preach to it of 
 Nature's immortal beauty and of the true way to do her reverence, Ruskin 
 has and had a position of genuine dignity. This ought to be enough for 
 the work and for the praise of any man. But the restlessness of Ruskin' s 
 temperament, combined Avith the extraordinary self-sufficiency which con- 
 tributed so much to his success where; ho was master of a subject, sent 
 him perpetually intruding into fields where he was unfit to labour, and 
 enterprises which he had no capacity to conduct. Seldom has a man con- 
 tradicted himself so often, so recklessly, and so complacently as Mr. Ruskin. 
 It is venturesome to call him a great critic even in art, for he seldom ex- 
 presses any opinion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. He 
 is a great writer as Rousseau was fresh, eloquent, audacious, writing out 
 of the fulness of the present mood, and heedless how far the impulse of 
 to-day may contravene that of yesterday. But as Rousseau was always 
 faithful to his idea of truth, so Ruskin is always faithful to Nature. When 
 all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly 
 forgotten, this will remain to his praise. No man since Wordsworth's 
 brightest days did half so much to teach his countrymen, and those who 
 speak his language, how to appreciate and honour that silent Nature 
 ' which never did betray the heart that loved her.' 
 
 In fiction as well as in poetry there are two great names to be compared 
 or contrasted when we turn to the literature of the earlier part of the 
 reign. In the very year of Queen Victoria's accession appeared the 
 1 Pickwick Papers,' the work of the author who the year before had pub- 
 lished the ' Sketches by Boz.' The public soon recognised the fact that a 
 new and wonderfully original force had come into literature. The success 
 of Charles Dickens is absolutely unequalled in the history of English 
 fiction. At the season of his highest popularity Sir Walter Scott was not 
 so popular an author. But that happened to Dickens which did not happen 
 to Scott. When Dickens was at his zenith, and when it might have been 
 thought that any manner cf rivalry with him was impossible, a literary 
 man, who was no longer young, who had been working with but moderate 
 success lor many years in light literature, suddenly took to writing novels, 
 and almost in a moment stepped up to a level with the author of ' Pick- 
 wick.' During the remainder of their careers the two men stood as nearly 
 ;is possible on the same level. Dickens always remained by far the more 
 popular of the two; but, on the other hand, it may be safely said that the 
 opinion of the literary world in general was inclined to favour Thackeray. 
 From the time of the publication of 'Vanity Fair' the two wore always 
 put side liy side for comparison or contrast. They have been soraelim'H
 
 1812-1870. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 443 
 
 likened to Fielding and Smollett, but no comparison could he more mis- 
 leading or less happy. Smollett stands on a level distinctly and consider- 
 ably below that, of Fielding ; hut Dickens cannot he said to stand thus 
 beneath Thackeray. It' the comparison were to hold at all, Thackeray 
 must be compared to Fielding, for Fielding is not in the least like Dickons; 
 hut then it must be allowed that Smollett wants inay of the higher 
 qualities of the author of ' David Copperfield.' It is natural that men 
 should compare Dickens and Thackeray ; but the two will he found to bf: 
 curiously unlike when once a certain superficial resemblance ceases to im- 
 press the mind. Their ways of treating a subject were not only dissimilar, 
 but were absolutely in contrast. They started, to begin with, under the 
 influence of a totally different philosophy (f life, if that is to be called a 
 philosophy which was probably only the result of peculiarity of tempera- 
 ment in each case. Dickens set out on the literary theory that in life 
 everything is better than it looks; Thackeray with the impression that it 
 is worse. In the one case there was somewhat too much of a mechanical in- 
 terpretation of every thing for the best in the best possible world ; in the other 
 the savour of cynicism was at times a little annoying. As each writer went 
 on, the peculiarity became more and more of a mannerism. But the 
 writings of Dickens were far more deeply influenced by his peculiarities 
 of feeling or philosophy than those of Thackeray. A large share of the 
 admiration which is popularly given to Dickens is undoubtedly a tribute 
 to what people consider his cheerful view of life. In that too lie is 
 especially English. In this country the artistic theory of France and other 
 continental nations, borrowed from the aesthetic principles of Greece, which 
 accords the palm to the artistic treatment rather than to the subject, or the 
 pin-pose or the way of looking at things, has found hardly any broad and 
 general acceptation. The popularity of Dickens was therefore in great mea- 
 sure due to the fact that he set forth life in cheerful lights and colours, lit: had 
 of course ifts of far higher ariistie value; he could describe anything that he 
 saw with a fidelity which Balzac could not have surpassed ; and like Balzac 
 he had a way of inspiring inanimate objects with a mystery and motive of 
 their own which gave them often a weird and fascinating individuality. 
 But it must be owned that if Dickens's peculiar 'philosophy' were 
 effaced from his works the; fame of the author would remain a very dif- 
 ferent thing from what it is at the present moment. On the other hand, it 
 would 1)0 possible to cut or.t of Thackeray all his little cynical, melancholy 
 sentences and reduce his novels to bare descriptions of life and character, 
 without affecting in any sensible degree his influence on I lie reader or hiii 
 position in literature. Thackeray had a marvellously keen appreciation of 
 human motive and character within certain limit-. If Dickens could dr::\v
 
 444 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxix 
 
 an old quaint house or an odd family interior as faithfully and yet as pic- 
 turesquely as Balzac, so on the other hand not Balzac himself could analyse 
 and illustrate the weaknesses and foibles of certain types of character with 
 greater subtlety of judgment and force of exposition than Thackeray. 
 Dickens had little or no knowledge of human character, and evidently 
 cared very little about the study. His stories are fairy tales made credible 
 by the masterly realism with which he described all the surroundings and 
 accessories, the costumes and the ways of his men and women. While we 
 are reading of a man whose odd peculiarities strike us with a sense of 
 reality as if we had observed them for ourselves many a time, while we 
 see him surrounded by streets and houses which seem to us rather more 
 real and a hundred times more interesting than those through which we 
 pass every day, we are not likely to observe very quickly or to take much 
 heed of the fact when we do observe it, that the man acts on various im- 
 portant occasions of his life as only people in fairy stories ever do act. 
 Thackeray, on the other hand, cared little for descriptions of externals. 
 He left his readers to construct for themselves the greater part of the sur- 
 roundings of his personages from his description of the characters of the 
 personages themselves. He made us acquainted with the man or woman 
 in his chapters as if we had known him or her all our life ; and knowing 
 Pendennis or Becky Sharp, we had no difficulty in constructing the sur- 
 roundin^s of either for ourselves. Thus it will be seen that these two 
 
 a 
 
 eminent authors had not only different ideas about life, but absolutely 
 contrasting principles of art. One worked from the externals inward ; the 
 other realised the unseen, and left the externals to grow of themselves. 
 Three great peculiarities, however, they shared. Each lived and wrote of 
 and for London. Dickens created for art the London of the middle and 
 poorer classes ; Thackeray did the same for the London of the upper class 
 and for those who strive to imitate their ways. Neither ever even at- 
 tempted to describe a man kept constantly above and beyond the atmosphere 
 of mere egotism by some sustaining greatness or even intensity of purpose. 
 In Dickens, as in Thackeray, the emotions described arc those of conven- 
 tional life merely. This is not to be said in disparagement of either 
 artist. It is rather a tribute to an artist's knowledge of his own capacity 
 and sphere of work that he only attempts to draw what he thoroughly 
 understands. But it is proper to remark of Dickens and of Thackeray, as 
 of Balzac, that the life they described was, after all, but the life of a coterie 
 or a quarter, and that there existed side by side with their field of work a 
 whole world of emotion, aspiration, struggle, defeat and triumph, of which 
 their brightest pages do not give a single suggestion. This is the more 
 curious to observe because of the third peculiarity which Dickens and 
 rhackeray had in common a love for the purely ideal and romantic in
 
 1811-1863. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMKS. 445 
 
 fiction There :iro many critics who hold that Dickons in ' Barnaby 
 Kudge ' and the ' Tale of Two Citie.- 1 ,' Thackeray in ' Ksmond,' exhibited 
 powers which vindicated for their possessors a very rare infusion of that 
 higher poetic spirit which might have made of both something greater 
 than the painters of the manners of a day and a class. But to paint the mari- 
 ners of a day and a class as Dickens and Thackeray have done is to deserve 
 fame and the gratitude of posterity. The age of Victoria may claim in this 
 respect an equality at least with that of the reign which produced Fi< Iding 
 <,nd Smollett ; for if there are some who would demand for Fielding a higher 
 place on the whole than can be given either toDickens or to Thackeray, there 
 are not many, on the other hand, who would not say that either Dickens 
 or Thackeray is distinctly superior to Smollett. The age must claim a 
 high place in art which could in one department alone produce two such 
 competitors. Their effect upon their time was something marvellous. 
 People talked Dickens or thought Thackeray. 
 
 Passion, it will be seen, counted for little in the works of Dickens and 
 Thackeray. Dickens, indeed, could draw a conventionally or dramatically 
 wicked man with much power and impressiveness ; and Thackeray could 
 suggest certain forms of vice with wonderful delicacy and yet vividness. 
 But the passions which are common to all human natures in their ele- 
 mentary moods made but little play in the novels of either writer. Both 
 were in this respect, for all their originality and genius in other ways, 
 highly and even exclusively conventional. There was apparently a sort 
 of understanding in the mind of each indeed Thackeray has admitted as 
 much in his preface to ' Pendennis' that men and women were not to be 
 drawn as men and women are known to be, but with certain reserves to 
 suit conventional etiquette. It is somewhat curious that the one only 
 novel-writer who during the period we are now considering came into any 
 real rivalry with them was one who depended on passion altogether for 
 her material and her success. The novels of a young woman, Charlotte 
 Bronte, compelled all English society into a recognition, not alone of their 
 own sterling power and genius, but also of the fact that profound and 
 passionate emotion was still the stuff out of which great fiction could be 
 constructed. ' Exultations, agonies, and love, and man's unconquerable 
 mind' were taken by Charlotte Bronte as the matter out of which her art 
 was to produce its triumphs. The novels which made her fiune, ' Jane 
 Eyre,' and ' Villette,' are positively aflame witli passion and pain. They 
 have little variety. They make hardly any pretence to accurate drawing 
 of ordinary men and women in ordinary life, or, at all events, under 
 ordinary conditions. The authoress had little of the gift of the mere 
 story-teller ; and her own peculiar powers were exerted sometimes with 
 indifferent success. The familiar on whom she depended for her inspira-
 
 446 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxix. 
 
 tion would not always conn.' ;it call. She had little genuine relish for 
 beauty, except the beauty of a weird melancholy and of decay. But 
 when she touched the chord of elementary human emotion with her best 
 skill, then it was impossible for her audience not to feel that they were 
 under the spell of a power rare indeed in our well -ordered days. The 
 absolute sincerity of the author's expression of feeling lent it great part 
 of its strength and charm. Nothing was ever said by her because it 
 seemed to society the right sort of thing to say. She told a friend that 
 she felt sure ' Jane Eyre ' would have an effect on readers in general 
 because it had so great an effect on herself. It would be possible to argue 
 that the great strength of the books lay in their sincerity alone ; that 
 Charlotte Bronte was not so much a woman of extraordinary genius as a 
 woman who looked her own feelings fairly in the face and painted them 
 as she saw them. But the capacity to do this would surely be something 
 which we could not better describe than by the word genius. Charlotte 
 Bronte was far from being an artist of fulfilled power. She is rather to 
 be regarded as one who gave evidence of extraordinary gifts which might 
 with time and care, and imder happier artistic auspices, have been turned 
 to such account as would have made for her a fame with the very chiefs 
 of her tribe. She died at an age hardly more mature than that at which 
 Thackeray won his first distinct literary success ; much earlier than the 
 age at which some of our greatest novelists brought forth their first com- 
 pleted novels. But she left a very deep impression on her time, and tho 
 time that has come and is coming after her. No other hand in the age of 
 Queen Victoria has dealt with human emotion so powerfully and so 
 truthfully. Hers are not cheerful novels. A cold grey mournful atmo- 
 sphere hangs over them. One might imagine that the shadow of an early 
 death is forecast on them. They love to linger among the glooms of 
 nature, to haunt her darkling wintry twilights, to study her stormy sun- 
 sets, to link man's destiny and his hopes, fears, and passions somehow 
 with the glare and gloom of storm and darkness, and to read the symbols 
 of his fate as the fore-doomed and passion-wasted Antony did in the cloud- 
 masses that are ' black vesper's pageants.' Tho supernatural had a con- 
 stant vague charm for Charlotte Bronte as the painful had. Man was to 
 her a being torn between passionate love and the more ignoble impulses 
 and ambitions and common-day occupations of life. Woman was a being 
 of equal passion, still more sternly and cruelly doomed to repression and 
 renunciation. It was a ftranire fact that in ihe midst of the splendid 
 material successes and the quietly triumphant intellectual progress of thi? 
 mcst prosperous and well-ordered age, when even in its poetry and its 
 romance passion was systematically toned down and put in thrall to good 
 taste arid propriety, this young writer should have- suddenly come out wilh
 
 1816-18,^5. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 447 
 
 her books all thrilling with dilution, and all protesting in the stn>i>geHt 
 piactieal manner against the theory that, the loves and hates of men and 
 women had been tamed by the process of civilisation. Perhaps the very 
 novelty of the apparition was in great measure a part, of its success. 
 Charlotte Bronte did not, indeed, influence the general public, or even thr 
 literary public, to anything like the same extent that Thackeray and 
 Dickens did. She appeared and passed away almost in a moment. As 
 Miss Martineau said of her, she stole like a shadow into literature and 
 then became a shadow again. But she struck very deeply into the heart 
 of the time. If her writings were only, as lias been said of them, a cry 
 of pain, yet they were such a cry as once heard lingers and echoes in the 
 mind for ever alter. Godwin declared that he would write in ' Caleb 
 Williams' a book which would leave no man who read it the same that 
 he was before. Something not unlike this might be said of ' Jane Eyre.' 
 No one who read it was exactly the same: that he had been before he 
 opened its weird and wonderful pages. 
 
 The novels of Mrs. Gaskell must not be without record. ' liuth,' and 
 * Cranlbrd,' and ' Wives and Daughters ' this last left unfinished, its 
 authoress called away by death are pictures of quiet English life, with 
 its homely joys and sorrows, which linger long in the mind, and have a 
 peculiar place in our literature. 
 
 No man could well have made more of his gifts than Lord Lytton. 
 Before the coining up of Dickens and Thackeray he stood above all living 
 English novelists. Perhaps this is rather to the reproach of the English 
 fiction of the day than to the renown of Lord Lytton. But even after 
 Dickensand Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte and later and not less power- 
 ful and original writers had appeared in the same field, he still held a 
 place of great mark in literature. That he was not a man of genius is, 
 perhaps, conclusively proved by the fact that he was able so readily to 
 change his style to suit the tastes of each day. lie began by writing of 
 fops and roue's of a time now almost forgotten ; then he made heroes of 
 highwaymen and murderers; afterwards he tried the philosophic and 
 mildly didactic style ; then he turned to mysticism and spiritualism ; later 
 still he wrote of the French Second Empire. Whatever he tried to d> he 
 did well. Besides his novels he wrote plays and poems ; and hi* plays 
 are among the very few modern productions which manage t<> keep the 
 stage. lie played, too, and with much success, at heing a statesman and 
 an orator. Not Demosthenes himself had such difficulties of articulation 
 to contend against in the beginning; and Demosthenes conquered his 
 difficulties, Avhile some of those in the way of Lord Lytton proved tin- 
 conquerable. Yet Lord Lyttoii did somehow contrive to become a great 
 speaker, and to seem occasionally like a great orator in the House of' Com-
 
 448 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxix. 
 
 mons. He was at the very least a superb phrase -maker; and he could 
 turn to account every scrap of knowledge in literature, art, or science 
 which he happened to possess. His success in the House of Commons 
 was exactly like his success in romance and the drama. He threw him- 
 self into competition with men of far higher original gifts, and he made 
 so good a show of contesting with them that in the minds of many the 
 victory was not clearly with his antagonists. There was always, for 
 example, a considerable class, even among educated persons, who main- 
 tained that Lytton was in his way quite the peer of Thackeray and 
 Dickens. His plays, or some of them, obtained a popularity only second 
 to those of Shakespeare ; and although nobody cared to read them, yet 
 people were always found to go and look at them. When Lytton went 
 into the House of Commons for the second time he found audiences which 
 were occasionally tempted to regard him. as the rival of Gladstone and 
 Bright. Not a few persons saw in all this only a sort of superb charla- 
 tanerie ; and indeed it is certain that no man ever made and kept a genuine 
 success in so many different fields as those in which Lord Lytton tried and 
 seemed to succeed. Rut he had splendid qualities ; he had everything 
 short of genius. He had indomitable patience, inexhaustible power of 
 self-culture, and a capacity for assimilating the floating ideas of the hour 
 which supplied the place of originality. He borrowed from the poet 
 the knack of poetical expression, and from the dramatist the trick of 
 construction ; from the Byronic time its professed scorn for the false gods 
 of the world ; and from the more modern period of popular science and 
 sham mysticism its extremes of materialism and magic ; and of these and 
 various other borrowings he made up an article which no one else could 
 have constructed out of the same materials. He was not a great author; 
 but he was a great literary man. Mr. Disraeii's novels belong in some 
 measure to the school of ' Pelham ' and ' Godolphin.' But it should be 
 said that Mr. Disraeli's ' Vivian Grey ' was published before ' Pelham ' 
 made its appearance. In all that belongs to political life Mr. Disraeli's 
 novels are far superior to those of Lord Lytton. We have nothing in our 
 literature to compare with some of the best of Mr. Disraeli's novels for 
 light political satire and for easy accurate characterisation of political 
 cliques and personages. But all else in Disraeli's novels is sham. The 
 sentiment, the poetry, the philosophy all these are sham. They have 
 not half the appearance of reality about them that Lytton has contrived 
 to give to his efforts of the same kind. In one at least of Disraeli's latest 
 novels the political sketches and satirising became sham also. 
 
 ' Alton Locke ' was published nearly thirty years ago. Then Charles 
 Kingsley became to most boys in Great Britain who read books at all a 
 sort of living embodiment of chivalry, liberty, and a revolt against tl>e
 
 1MH5. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 41!) 
 
 established order of class-oppression in so many spheres <>f our society. 
 For a long time he continued to be the chosen hero of young men with 
 the youthful spirit of revolt in them, with dre;uns of Republics and ideas 
 about the equality of man. Later on lie commanded other admiration 
 for other qualities for the championship of slave systems, of oppression, 
 and the iron reign of mere force. But though Charles Kingsle.y always 
 held a high place somewhere in popular estimation, he is not to be rated 
 very highly as an author. He described glowing scenery admirably, and 
 he rang the changes vigorously on his two or three ideas the muscular 
 Englishman, the glory of the Elizabethan discoveries, and so on. He was 
 a scholar, and he wrote verses which sometimes one is on the point of 
 mistaking for poetry, so much of the poet's feeling have they in them. 
 He did a great many things very cleverly. Perhaps if he had done less 
 he might have done better. Human capacity is limited. It is not given 
 to mortal to be a great preacher, a great philosopher, a great scholar, a 
 great poet, a great historian, a great novelist, and an indefatigable country 
 parson. Charles Kingsley never seems to have made up his mind for 
 which of these callings to go in especially, and being, with all his versa- 
 tility, not at all many-sided, but strictly one-sided and almost one-idea'd, 
 the result was, that while touching success at many points he absolutely 
 mastered it at none. Since his novel ' Westward Ho,' he never added 
 anything substantial to his reputation. All this acknowledged, however, 
 it must still be owned that, failing in this, that, and the other attempt, and 
 never achieving any real and enduring success, Charles Kingsley was an 
 influence and a man of mark in the Victorian age. 
 
 Perhaps a word ought to be said of the rattling romances of Irish 
 electioneering, love-making, and fighting which set people reading ' Charles 
 Q'Malley ' and ' Jack Hinton,' even when ' Pickwick ' was still a novelty. 
 Charles Lever had wonderful animal spirits and a broad bright humour. 
 He was quite genuine in his way. He afterwards changed his style com- 
 pletely, and with much success ; and will be found in the later part of 
 the period holding just the same relative place as in the earlier, just 
 behind the foremost men, but in a manner so different thai he might be a 
 new writer who had never read a line of the roystering adventures of 
 Light Dragoons which were popular when Charles Lever first gave them 
 to the world. There was nothing great about Lever, but the literature of 
 the Victorian period would not be quite all that we know it without him. 
 There were many other popular novelists during the period we have passed 
 over, some in their day more popular than either Thackeray or Charlotte 
 Bronte. Many of us can remember without being too much ashamed of 
 the fact that there were early days when Mr. James and hi? cavaliers and 
 
 VOL. I. 00
 
 450 A HISTOBY OF DUE OWN TIMES. OH. xxix. 
 
 his chivalric adventures gave nearly as much delight as Walter Scott could 
 have given to the youth of a preceding generation. But Walter Scott is 
 with us still, young and old, and poor James is gone. His once famous 
 solitary horseman has ridden away into actual solitude, and the shades of 
 night have gathered over his heroic form. 
 
 The founding of Punch drew together a host of clever young writers, 
 Borne of whom made a really deep mark on the literature of their time, 
 and the combined influence of whom in this artistic and literary under- 
 taking was on the whole decidedly wealthy. Thackeray was by far the 
 greatest of the regular contributors to Punch in its earlier days. But 
 ' The Song of the Shirt' appeared in its pages, and some of the brightest 
 of Douglas Jerrold's writings made their appearance there. Punch was a 
 thoroughly English production. It had little or nothing in common with 
 the comic periodicals of Paris. It ignored absolutely and of set purpose 
 the whole class of subjects which make up three-fourths of the stock in 
 trade of a French satirist. The escapades of husbands and the infidelities 
 of wives form the theme of by far the greater number of the humorous 
 sketches with pen or pencil in Parisian comicalities. Punch kept altogether 
 aloof from such unsavoury subjects. It had an advantage, of course, 
 which was habitually denied to the French papers it had unlimited free- 
 dom of political satire and caricature. Politics and the more trivial 
 troubles and trials of social life gave subjects to Punch. The inequalities 
 of class and the struggles of ambitious and vain persons to get into circles 
 higher than their own, or at least to imitate their manners these supplied 
 for Punch the place of the class of topics on which French papers relied 
 when they had to deal with the domestic life of the nation. Punch started 
 by being somewhat fiercely Radical, but gradually toned away into a sort 
 of intelligent and respectable Conservatism. Its artistic sketches were 
 from first to last admirable. Some men of true genius wrought for it 
 with the pencil as others did with the pen. Doyle, Leech, and Tenniel 
 were men of whom any school of art might well be proud. A remarkable 
 sobriety of style was apparent in all their humours. Of later years cari- 
 cature has had absolutely no place in the illustrations to Punch. The 
 satire is quiet, delicate, and no doubt superficial. It is a satire of manners, 
 dress, and social ways altogether. There is justice in the criticism that, of 
 late more especially, the pages of PwncA give no idea whatever of the emotions 
 of the English people. There is no suggestion of grievance, of bitterness, of 
 passion or pain. It is all made up of the pleasures and annoyances of the 
 kind of life which is enclosed in a garden party. But it must be said 
 that Punch has thus always succeeded in maintaining a good, open, con- 
 venient neutral ground, "tfhere youn^ men and maidens, girls and boys,
 
 1866. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 451 
 
 elderly politicians and staid matrons, law, trade, science, all sects and 
 creeds, may safely and pleasantly mingle. It, is not so, to be sure, thai 
 great satire is wrought. A Swift or a Juvenal is not thus to he brought 
 out. Hut a votary of the present would have his answer simple and con 
 elusive : we live in the age of Punch ; we do not live in the age of Juvenal 
 or Swift. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 THE LOUCHA ' AHKOW.' 
 
 AFTEK the supposed settlement of the Eastern Question at the Con- 
 gress of Paris, a sort of languor seems to have come over Parliament 
 and the public mind in England. Lord John Russell endeavoured 
 unsuccessfully to have something done which should establish in 
 England a genuine system of national education. He proposed a series 
 of resolutions, one of which laid down the principle that after a certain 
 appointed time, when any school district should have been declared 
 to be deficient in adequate means for the education of the poor, the 
 Quarter Sessions of the Peace for the county, city, or borough should 
 have power to impose a school rate. This was a step in the direction 
 of compulsory education. It anticipated the principle on which the 
 first genuine measure for national instruction was founded many years 
 after. It was of course rejected by the House of Commons when Lord 
 John Russell proposed it. Public opinion, both in and out of Parlia- 
 ment, was uot nearly ripe for such a principle then. All such pro- 
 posals were quietly disposed of with the observation that that sort of 
 thing might do very well for Prussians, but would never suit English- 
 men. That was a time when a Prussian was regarded in England as a 
 dull, beer-bemused, servile creature, good for nothing better than to 
 grovel before his half-inebriated monarchs, and to get the stick from his 
 incapable military officers. The man who suggested then that perhaps 
 some day the Prussians might show that they knew how to fight would 
 have been set down as on a par intellectually with the narrow-minded 
 grumbler who did not believe in the profound sagacity of the Emperor 
 of the French. For a country of practical men England is ruled to a 
 marvellous extent by phrases, and the term ' un-English ' was destined 
 for a considerable time to come to settle all attempts at the introduction 
 of any system of national education which even touched on the com- 
 pulsory principle. One of the regular attempts to admit the Jews to 
 Parliament was made and succeeded in the House of Commons, to fail, 
 
 o o 2
 
 452 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. en. xxx. 
 
 ns usual, in the House of Lords. The House of Lords itself was thrown 
 into gi'eat perturbation for a time by the proposal of the Government to con- 
 fer a peerage for life on one of the judges, Sir James Parke. Lord Lynd- 
 hurst strongly opposed the proposal, on the ground that it was the begin- 
 ning of an attempt to introduce a system of life-peerages, which would 
 destroy the ancient and hereditary character of the House of Lords, allow 
 of its being at any time broken up and remodelled according to the dis- 
 cretion of the minister in power, and reduce it in fact to the level of a con- 
 tinental life senate. Many members of the House of Commons were like- 
 wise afraid of the innovation ; it seemed to foreshadow the possible revival 
 of an ancient principle of Crown nomination which might be applied to 
 the representatives as well as to the hereditary chamber, seeing that at one 
 time English sovereigns did undoubtedly assume the right of nominating 
 members of the House of Commoms. The Government, who had really 
 no reactionary or revolutionary designs in their mind, settled the matter 
 for the time by creating Sir James Parke Baron Wensleydale in the 
 usual way, and the object they had in view was quietly accomplished 
 many years later, when the appellate jurisdiction of the Lords was 
 remodelled. 
 
 Sir George Lewis was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was as yet 
 not credited with anything like the political ability which he afterwards 
 proved that he possessed. It was the fashion to regard him as a mere 
 bookman, who had drifted somehow into Parliament, and who, in the 
 temporary absence of available talent, had been thrust into the office lately 
 held by Mr. Gladstone. The contrast indeed between the style of his 
 speaking and that of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli was enough to dishearten 
 any political assembly. Mr. Gladstone had brought to his budget speeches 
 an eloquence that brightened the driest details and made the wilderness of 
 figures to blossom like the rose. Mr. Disraeli was able to make a financial 
 statement burst into a bouquet of fireworks. Sir George Lewis began by 
 being nearly inaudible, and continued to the last to be oppressed by the 
 most ineffective and unattractive manner and delivery. But it began to 
 be gradually found out that the monotonous, halting, feeble manner 
 covered a very remarkable power cf expression ; that the speaker hud 
 great resources of argument, humour, and illustration ; that every sentence 
 contained some fresh idea or some happy expression It was not very 
 long before an experienced observer in Parliament declared that Sir 
 George Lewis delivered the best speeches with the worst manner known 
 to the existing House of Commons. After a while a reaction set in, and 
 the capacity of Lewis ran the risk of being overrated quite as much as it 
 had been undervalued before. In him, men said, was ser-n the coining
 
 1659. A HISTORY 01- OUR OWN TIMES. 453 
 
 prime minister of England. Time, as it will he seen afterwards, did not 
 allow Sir George Lewis any chance of making good this prediction, lit 
 was undoubtedly a man of rare ability and refined intellect ; an example 
 very uncommon in England of the thinker, the scholar, and the statesman 
 in one. His speeches were an intellectual treat to all with whom matter 
 counted for more than manner. One who had watched Parliamentary life 
 from without and within for many years said he had never had his 
 deliberate opinion changed by a speech in the House of Commons but 
 twice, and each time it was an argument from Sir George Lewis that 
 accomplished the conversion. 
 
 For the present, however, Sir George Lewis was regarded only as the 
 sort of statesman whom it was fitting to have in office just then; the 
 statesman of an interval in whom no one was expected to take any par- 
 ticular interest. The attention of the public was a good deal distracted 
 from political affairs by the simultaneous outbreak of new forms of crime 
 and fraud. The trial of Palmer in the Rugely poisoning case, the trial 
 of Dove in the Leeds poisoning case, these and similar events set the popular 
 mind into wild alarm as to the prevalence of strychnine poisoning every- 
 where. The failure and frauds of the Royal British Bank, the frauds of 
 Robson and Redpath, gave for the time a sort of idea that the financial 
 principles of the country were crumbling to pieces. The culmination of 
 the extraordinary career of John Sadleir was fresh in public memory. 
 This man, it will be recollected, was the organiser and guiding spirit of 
 the Irish Brigade, the gang of adventurers whom we have already described 
 as trading on the genuine grievances of their country to get power and 
 money for themselves. John Sadleir overdid the thing. He embezzled, 
 swindled, forged, and finally escaped justice by committing suicide on 
 Ilampstead Heath. So fraudful had his life been that many persons per- 
 sisted in believing that his supposed suicide was but another fraud. He 
 had got possession such was the theory of a dead body which bore 
 Borne resemblance to his own form and features ; he had palmed this off 
 as his own corpse done to death by poison; and had himself contrived 
 to escape with a large portion of his ill-gotten money. This extra- 
 ordinary parody and perversion of the plot of Jean Paul Richter's story 
 of 'Siebenkas' really found many faithful believers. It is worth men- 
 tioning, not as a theory credible in itself', but as an evidence of the belief 
 that had got abroad as to the character and the stratagems of Sadleir. 
 The brother of Sadleir was expelled from the House of Commons; one 
 of his accomplices, who had obtained a Government appointment and had 
 embezzled money, contrived to make his escape to the United States ; 
 and the Irish Brigade was broken up. It is only just to say that the
 
 454 A HISTORY OJF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxx. 
 
 best representatives of the Irish Catholics and the Irish national party, in 
 and out of Parliament, had never from the first believed in Sadleir and 
 his band, and had made persistent efforts to expose them. 
 
 About this same time Mr. Cyrus W. Field, an energetic American 
 merchant, came over to this country to explain to its leading merchants 
 and scientific men a plan he had for constructing an electric telegraph 
 line underneath the Atlantic. Mr. Field had had this idea strongly in his 
 mind for some years, and he made a strenuous effort to impress the 
 English public with a conviction of its practicability. He was received 
 by the merchants of Liverpool on November 12, 1856, in their Exchange 
 Rooms, and he made a long statement explaining his views, which were 
 listened to with polite curiosity. Mr. Field had, however, a much better 
 reception on the whole than M. de Lesseps, who came to England a few 
 months later to explain his project for constructing a ship canal across the 
 Isthmus of Suez. The proposal was received with coldness, and more 
 than coldness, by engineers, capitalists, and politicians. Engineers showed 
 that the canal could not be made, or at least maintained when made ; 
 capitalists proved that it never could pay ; and politicians were ready to 
 make it. plain that such a canal, if made, would be a standing menace to 
 English interests. Lord Palmerston, a few days after, frankly admitted 
 that the English Government were opposed to the project, because it 
 would tend to the more easy separation of Egypt from Turkey, and set 
 afloat speculations as to a ready access to India. M. de Lesseps himself 
 has given an amusing account of the manner in which Lord Palmerston 
 denounced the scheme in an interview with the projector. Luckily. 
 neither Mr. Field nor M. de Lesseps was a person to be lightly discouraged. 
 Great projectors are usually as full of their own ideas as great poets. M. 
 de Lesseps had in the end perhaps more reason to be alarmed at England's 
 sudden appreciation of his scheme than he had in the first instance to com- 
 plain ol' the cold disapprobation with which her Government encountered it.' 
 
 The political world seemed to have made up its mind for a season of 
 quiet. Suddenly that happened which always does happen in such a con- 
 dition of things a storm broke out. To those who remember the events 
 at that time, three words will explain the nature of the disturbance. 
 'The lorcha Arrow ' will bring back the recollection of one of the most 
 curious political convulsions known in this country during our generation. 
 For years after the actual events connected with the lorcha Arrow, the 
 very iiarns of that ominous vessel used to send a shudder through the 
 House of Commons. The word suggested first an impassioned controversy 
 which had left a painful impression on the condition of political parties, 
 and next an effort of futile persistency to open the whole controversy over
 
 1857. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 455 
 
 again, and force it upon the notice of legislators who wished for nothing 
 better than to be allowed to forget it. 
 
 In the speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament, on 
 February 3, 1857, the following passage occurred : ' Her Majesty com- 
 mands us to inform you that acts of violence, insults to the British flag, 
 and the infraction of treaty rights, committed by the local Chinese* 
 authorities at Canton, and a pertinacious refusal of redress, have rendered 
 it necessary for her Majesty's officers in China to have recourse to 
 measures of force to obtain satisfaction.' The acts of violence, the insults 
 to the British flag, and the infraction of treaty rights alleged to have been 
 committed by the Chinese authorities at Canton had for their single victim 
 the lorcha Arrow. The lorcha Arrow was a small boat built on the 
 European model. The word ' Lorcha ' is taken from the Portuguese 
 settlement at Macao at the mouth of Canton the river. It often occurs in 
 treaties with the Chinese authorities. ' Every British schooner, cutter, 
 lorcha, etc.,' are words that we constantly find in these documents. On 
 October 8, 1856, a party of Chinese in charge of an officer boarded a boat, 
 called the Arroiv, in the Canton river. They took off twelve men on a 
 charge of piracy, leaving two men in charge of the lorcha. The Arrow 
 was declared by its owners to be a British vessel. Our Consul at Canton, 
 Mr. Parkes, demanded from Yeh, the Chinese Governor of Canton, the 
 return of the men, basing his demand upon the ninth Article of the Sup- 
 plemental Treaty of 1843, entered into subsequently to the Treaty of 
 1842. We need not go deeper into the terms of this Treaty than to say 
 that there could be no doubt that it did not give the Chinese authorities 
 any right to seize Chinese offenders or supposed offenders on board an 
 English vessel. It merely gave them a right to require the surrender 
 of the offenders at the hands of the English. The Chinese Governor, 
 Yeh, contended, however, that the lorcha was not an English but a 
 Chinese vessel a Chinese pirate, venturing occasionall}' for her own 
 purposes to fly the flag of England, which she had no right whatever to 
 hoist. Under the Treaties with China, British vessels were to be subject 
 to consular authority only. The Treaty provided amply for the registration 
 of vessels entitled to British protection, for the regular renewal of the re- 
 gistration, and for the conditions under which the registration was to be 
 ^ranted or renewed. The Arrow had somehow obtained a British 
 
 o 
 
 registration, but it had expired about ten days before the occurrence 
 in the Canton river, and even the British authorities who had been 
 persuaded to grant the registration were not certain whether, with the 
 knowledge they subsequently obtained, it could legally be renewed. We 
 believe it may be plainly stated at once, as a matter of fact, that the Arrow
 
 456 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxx. 
 
 was not an English vessel, but only a Chinese vessel which had obtained 
 by false pretences the temporary possession of a British flag. Mr. Consul 
 Parkes, however, was fussy, and he demanded the instant restoration 
 of the captured men, and he sent off to our Plenipotentiary at Hong 
 Kong, Sir John Bowring, for authority and assistance in the business. 
 
 Sir John Bowring was a man of considerable ability. At one time 
 he seemed to be a candidate for something like fame. He was the 
 political pupil and the literary executor of Jeremy Bentham, and for 
 some years was editor of the Westminster Review. He had a very large 
 and varied, although not profound or scholarly, knowledge of European 
 and Asiatic languages (there was not much scientific study of languages 
 in his early days), he had travelled a great deal, and had sat in Parliament 
 for some years. He understood political economy, and had a good 
 knowledge of trade and commerce ; and in those days a literary man who 
 knew anything about trade and commerce was thought a person of almost 
 miraculous versatility. Bowring had many friends and admirers, and he 
 set up early for a sort of great man. He was full of self-conceit, and 
 without any very clear idea of political principles on the large scale. 
 Nothing in all his previous habits of life, nothing in the association and 
 friendships by which he had long been surrounded, nothing in his studies 
 or his writings warranted any one in expecting that when placed in a 
 responsible position in China at a moment of great crisis he would have 
 taken on him to act the part which aroused such a controversy. It 
 would seem as if his eager self-conceit would not allow him to resist the 
 temptation to display himself on the field of political action as a great 
 English Plenipotentiary, a master-spirit of the order of Clive or War- 
 ren Hastings, bidding England be of good cheer, and compelling in- 
 ferior races to grovel in the dust before her. Bowring knew China as 
 well as it was then likely that an Englishman could know the 
 ' huge mummy empire by the hands of custom wrapped in swathing 
 bands.' He had been Consul for some years at Canton, and he had held 
 the post of chief superintendent of trade there. He sent to the Chinese 
 authorities and demanded the surrender of all the men taken from the 
 Arrow. Not merely did he demand the surrender of the men, but he 
 insisted that an apology should be offered for their arrest, and a formal 
 pledge given by the Chinese authorities that no such act should ever be 
 committed again. If this were not done within forty-eight hours, naval 
 operations were to be begun against the Chinese. This sort of demand 
 was less like that of a dignified English official, conscious of the 
 justice of his cause and the strength of his country, than like the 
 demeanour of Ancient Pistol formulating his terms to the fallen French-
 
 l.57. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKN. 457 
 
 man on the battle-field : ' I'll for him, and firk him, and ferret him 
 discuss the same in French unto him.' Sir John Bowring called out to 
 the Chinese Governor, Yeh, that he would fer him, and lirk him, and ferret 
 him, and bade the same be discussed in Chinese unto him. Yeh sent back 
 all the men, saying in effect that he did so to avoid the ferring, and firking, 
 and ferreting, and he even undertook to promise that for the future great 
 care should be taken that no British ship should be visited improperly by 
 Chinese officers. But he could not offer an apology for the particular case 
 of the Arrow, for he still maintained, as was indeed the fact, that the Arrow 
 was a Chinese vessel, and that the English had nothing to do with her. In 
 truth, Sir John Bowring had himself written to Consul Parkes to say that 
 the Arrow had no right to hoist the English flag, as her licence, however ob- 
 tained, had expired ; but he got over this difficulty by remarking that after all 
 the Chinese did not know that fact, and that they were therefore responsible. 
 Accordingly, Sir John Bowring carried out his threat and immediately 
 made war on China. He did something worse than making war in the 
 ordinary way ; he had Canton bombarded by the fleet which Admiral Sir 
 Michael Seymour commanded. From October 23 to November 13 naval and 
 military operations were kept up continuously. A large number of forts 
 and junks were taken and destroyed. The suburbs of Canton were 
 battered down in order that the ships might have a clearer range to 
 fire upon the city. Shot and shell were poured in upon Canton. Sir 
 John Bowring thought the time appropriate for reviving certain alleged 
 treaty rights for the admission of representatives of British authority into 
 Canton. During the Parliamentary debates that followed, Sir John 
 Bowring was accused by Lord Derby and Mr. Cobden of having a sort of 
 monomania about getting into Canton. Curiously enough, in his auto- 
 biographical fragments Sir John Bowring tells us when he was a little 
 boy he dreamed that he was sent by the King of England as ambassadoi 
 to China. In his later days he appears to have been somewhat childishly 
 anxious to realise this dream of his infancy. He showed all a child's 
 persistent strength of will and weakness of reason in enforcing his 
 demand, and he appears, at one period o the controversy, to have thought 
 that it had no other end than his solemn entry into Canton. Meanwhile 
 Commissioner Yeh retaliated by foolishly offering a reward for the head 
 of every Englishman. Throughout the whole business Sir John Bowring 
 contrived to keep himself almost invariably in the wrong, and even where 
 his claim happened to be in itself good he managed to assert it in a man- 
 ner at once untimely, inprudent, and indecent. 
 
 This news from China created a considerable sensation in England, 
 although not many public men had any idea of the manner in which i)
 
 458 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxx 
 
 was destined to affect the House of Commons. On February 24, 1857, 
 Lord Derby brought forward in the House of Lords a motion, compre- 
 hensively condemning the whole of the proceedings of the British 
 authorities in China. The debate would have been memorable if only 
 for the powerful speech in which the venerable Lord Lyndlmrst supported 
 the motion, and exposed the utter illegality of the course pursued by Sir 
 John Bowring. Lord Lyndhurst declared that the proceedings of the 
 British authorities could not be justified upon any principle, either of 
 law or of reason ; that the Arrow was simply a Chinese vessel, built in 
 China, and owned and manned by Chinamen ; and he laid it down as a 
 ' principle which no one will successfully contest,' that you may give 
 ' any rights and privileges to a foreigner or a foreign vessel as against 
 yourself, but you cannot grant to any such foreigner a single right or 
 privilege as against a foreign State.' In other words, if the British 
 authorities chose to give a British licence to a Chinese pirate boat which 
 would secure her some immunity against British law, that would be 
 altogether an affair for themselves and their Government ; but they 
 could not pretend by any British register or other document to give a 
 Chinese boat in Chinese waters a right of exemption from the laws of 
 China. Perhaps the whole question never could have arisen if it were 
 not for the fact on which Lord Lyndhurst commented, that ' when we are 
 talking of treaty transactions with Eastern nations, we have a kind of 
 loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to them.' The question 
 as to the right conferred by the licence, such as it was, to hoist the 
 British flag, could not have been disposed of more effectually than it 
 was by the Chinese Governor Yeh himself, in a single sentence. ' A 
 lorcha,' as Yeh put it, ' owned by a Chinese, purchased a British flag ; 
 did that make her a British vessel ? ' The Lord Chancellor was actually 
 driven to answer Lord Lyndhurst by contending that, no matter whether 
 the lorcha was legally or illegally flying the British flag, it was not for 
 the Chinese to assume that she was flying it illegally, and that they had 
 no right to board the vessel on the assumption that she was not what 
 she pretented to be. To show the value of that argument, it is only neces- 
 sary to say that if such were the recognised principle, every pirate in the 
 Canton river would have nothing further to do than to hoist any old scrap 
 of British bunting and sail on, defiant, under the very eyes of the Chinese 
 authorities. The Governor of Canton would be compelled to make a 
 formal complaint to Sir John Bowring, and trust meanwhile that a spirit 
 of fair play would induce the pirates to wait for a formal investigation i>y 
 the British authorities. Otherwise neither Chinese nor British could lake 
 nny steps to capture the offenders.
 
 1867. A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMKS. 459 
 
 The House of Lords rejected the motion of Lord Derby by a majority 
 nf 146 to 110. On February 26, Mr.Cobden brought forward a motion ir 
 the Hmse of Commons, declaring that ' the papers which have been laid 
 upon the table fail to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent 
 measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of the Arrou:,' and de- 
 manding ' that a select committee be appointed to inquire into the state of 
 our commercial relations with China.' This must have been a peculiarly 
 painful task for Mr. Cobden. He was an old friend of Sir John Bnwring, 
 with whom he had always supposed himself to have many or most opinions 
 in common. But he followed his convictions as to public duty in despite 
 of personal friendship. It is a curious evidence of the manner in which 
 the moral principles become distorted in a political contest, that during 
 the subsequent elections it was actually made a matter of reproach to 
 Mr. Cobden that while acknowledging his old friendship for Sir John 
 Bowring he was nevertheless found ready to move a vote of censure on 
 his public conduct. The debate was remarkable more for the singular 
 political combination which it developed as it went on than even for its 
 varied ability and eloquence. Men spoke and voted on the same side who 
 had probably never been brought into such companionship before and 
 never were afterwards. Mr. Cobden found himself supported by Mr. 
 Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, by Mr. Roebuck and Sir E. B. Lytton, by 
 Lord John Russell and Mr. Whiteside, by Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards 
 the Marquis of Salisbury, Sir Frederick Thesiger, Mr. Roundell Palmer, 
 afterwards Lord Selborne, Mr. Sydney Herbert, and Mr. Milner Gibson. 
 The discussion lasted four nights, and it was only as it went on that men's 
 eyes began to open to its political importance. Mr. Cobden had probably 
 never dreamed of the amount or the nature of the support his motion 
 was destined to receive. The Government and the Opposition alike held 
 meetings out of doors to agree upon a general line of action in the debate 
 and to prepare for the result. Lord Palmerston was conyinced that he 
 would come all right in the end, but he felt that he had made himself 
 obnoxious to the advanced Liberals by his indifference, or rather hosti- 
 lity, to every project of reform, and he persuaded himself that the oppor- 
 tunity would be eagerly caught at by them to make a combination with 
 the Tories against him. In all this he was deceiving himself, as he had 
 done more than once before. There is not the slightest reason to believe 
 that anything but a growing conviction of the insufficiency of the defence 
 set up for the proceedings in Canton influenced the great majority of 
 those who spoke and voted for Mr. Cobden's motion. The truth is, that 
 there has seldom been so flagrant and so inexcusable an exampl.- of 
 high-handed lawlessness in the dealings of a strong with a weak natiun
 
 460 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TlMES. en. Xxx. 
 
 \Vhen the debate first began it is quite possible that many public men 
 still believed some explanation or defence was coming forward which 
 would enable them to do what the House of Commons is always unwilling 
 not to do to sustain the action of an English official in a foreign country. 
 As the discussion went on it became more and more evident that there 
 was no such defence or explanation. Men found their consciences coerced 
 into a condemnation of Sir John Bowring's conduct. It was almost lu- 
 dicrous when the miserable quibblings and evasions of the British officials 
 came to be contrasted with the cruelly clear arguments of the Chinese. 
 The reading of these latter documents came like a practical enforcement of 
 Mr. Cobden's description of the Chinese Empire as a State ' which had its 
 system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before 
 that of Socrates.' The vote of censure was carried by 263 votes against 
 247 a majority of 16. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli, in the course of a clever and defiant speech made towards 
 the close of the long debate, had challenged Lord Palmerston to take the 
 opinion of the country on the policy of the government. ' I should like,' 
 he exclaimed, ' to see the programme of the proud leaders of the Liberal 
 party no reform, new taxes, Canton blazing, Pekin invaded.' Lord 
 Palmerston's answer was virtually that of Brutus : ' Why, I will see 
 thee at Philippi then.' He announced two or three days after that the 
 Government had resolved on a dissolution and an appeal to the country. 
 Lord Palmerston knew his Pappenheimers. He understood his country- 
 men. He knew that a popular Minister makes himself more popular by 
 appealing to the country on the ground that he has been condemned by 
 the House of Commons for upholding the honour of England and coercing 
 some foreign Power somewhere. His address to the electors of Tiverton 
 differed curiously in its plan of appeal from that of Lord John Kussell to 
 the electors of the City, or that of Mr. Disraeli to those of Buckingham- 
 shire. Lord John Russell coolly and wisely argued out the controversy 
 between him and Lord Palmerston, and gave very satisfactory reasons to 
 prove that there was no sufficient justification for the bombardment of 
 Canton. Mr. Disraeli described Lord Palmerston as the Tory chief of a 
 Radical Cabinet, and declared that, ' with no domestic policy, he is obliged 
 to divert the attention of the people from the consideration of their own 
 affairs to the distractions of foreign politics.' ' His external system is tur- 
 bulent and aggressive, that his rule at home may be tranquil and uri- 
 absailed.' In later days a charge not altogether unlike that was made 
 against an English Prime Minister who was not Lord Palmerston. Lord 
 Palmerston understood the temper of the country too well to trouble himself 
 about arguments of any kind. He came to the point at once. In his address
 
 ISS7. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4fil 
 
 to the electors ofTiverton he declared that ' an ineolent barbarian, wielding 
 authority at Canton, violated the British flap;, broke the engagements of 
 treaties, offered rewards for the heads of British subjects in that part of 
 China, and planned their destruction by murder, assassination, and poison.' 
 That of course was all-sufficient. The ' insolent barbarian ' was in itself 
 almost enough. Governor Yen certainly was not a barbarian. His argu- 
 ment on the subject of International Law obtained the endorsement of 
 Lord Lyndhurst. His way of arguing the political and commercial case 
 compelled the admiration of Lord Derby. His letters form a curious con- 
 trast to the ducuments contributed to the controversy by the repre- 
 sentatives of British authority in China. However, he became for elec- 
 tioneering purposes an insolent barbarian ; and the story of a Chinese 
 baker who was said to have tried to poison Sir John Bowring became 
 transfigured into an attempt at the wholesale poisoning of Englishmen in 
 China by the express orders of the Chinese Governor. Lord Palmerston 
 further intimated that he and his Government had been censured by a 
 combination of factious persons who, if they got into power and were, 
 prepared to be consistent, must apologise to the Chinese Government and 
 offer compensation to the Chinese Commissioner. ' Will the British 
 nation,' he asked, ' give their support to men who have thus endeavoured 
 to make the humiliation and the degradation of their country the stepping- 
 stone to power ? ' 
 
 No, to be sure ; the British nation would do nothing of the kind. 
 Lord Derby, Lord Lyndhurst, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, Mr. Disraeli, 
 Sir E. B. Lytton, Lord Grey, Lord Robert Cecil these were the craven 
 Englishmen, devoid of all patriotic or manly feeling, who were trying 
 to make the humiliation and degradation of their country a stepping- 
 stone to power. They were likewise the friends and allies of the insolent 
 barbarian. There were no music-halls of the modern type in those days. 
 Had there been such, the denunciations of the insolent barbarian, and of 
 his still baser British friends, would no doubt have been shouted forth 
 night after night in the metropolis, to the accompaniment of rattling 
 glasses and clattering pint-pots. Even without the alliance of the music- 
 halls, however, Lord Palmerston swept the field of his enemies. His 
 victory was complete. The defeat of the men of peace in especial was 
 what Mr. Ruskin once called not a fall, but a castastrophe. Cobden, 
 Bright, Milner Gibson, W. J. Fox, Layard, ?nd many < 'her leading 
 opponents of the Chinese policy were left without seats. There was 
 something peculiarly painful in the circumstances of Mr. Bright' H defeat 
 at Manchester. Mr. Bright was suffering from severe illness. In 
 the opinion of many of his friends his health was thoroughly broken.
 
 462 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxx. 
 
 He had worked in public life with the generous disregard of his 
 physical resources ; and he was compelled to leave the country and 
 seek rest first in Italy and afterwards in Algeria. It was not a 
 time when even political enmity could with a good grace have ventured 
 to visit on him the supposed offences of his party. But the ' insolent 
 barbarian ' phrase overthrew him too. He sent home from Florence a 
 farewell address to the electors of Manchester, which was full of quiet 
 dignity. ' I have esteemed it a high honour,' thus ran one passage of the 
 address, ' to be one of your representatives, and have given more of mental 
 and physical labour to your service than is just to myself. I feel it scarcely 
 less an honour to suffer in the cause of peace, and on behalf of what I 
 believe to be the true interests of my country, though I could have 
 wished that the blow had come from other hands, at a time when I could 
 have met face to face those who dealt it.' 
 
 Not long after, Mr. Cobden, one of the least sentimental and the most 
 unaffected of men, speaking in the Manchester Free-trade Hall of the 
 circumstances of Mr. Bright's rejection from Manchester, and the leave- 
 taking address which so many regarded as the last public word of a great 
 career, found himself unable to go on with that part of his speech. An 
 emotion more honourable to the speaker and his subject than the most 
 elaborate triumph of eloquence checked the flow of the orator's words, 
 and for the moment made him inarticulate. 
 
 Lord Palmerston came back to power with renewed and redoubled 
 strength. The little war with Persia, which will be mentioned afterwards, 
 came to an end in time to give him another claim as a conqueror on the 
 sympathies of the constituencies. His appointments of bishops had given 
 great satisfaction to the Evangelical party, and he had become for the time 
 quite a sort of Church hero, much to the amusement of Lord Derby, who 
 made great sport of ' Palmerston, the true Protestant ; ' ' Palmerston, the 
 only Christian Prime Minister.' In the Royal Speech at the opening of 
 Parliament it was announced that the differences between this country 
 and China still remained unadjusted, and that therefore ' Her Majesty had 
 sent to China a Plenipotentiary fully entrusted to deal with all matters of 
 difference ; and that Plenipotentiary will be supported by an adequate 
 naval and military force in the event of such assistance becoming 
 necessary.' It would be almost superfluous to say that the assistance of 
 the naval and military force thus suggested was found to be necessary. The 
 Government, however, had more serious business with which to occupy 
 themselves before they were at liberty to turn to the easy work of coercing 
 the Chinese. 
 
 The new Parliament was engaged for some time in passing the Act
 
 18/57. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 463 
 
 for the establishment of a Court of Divorce that is to say, abolishing the 
 ancient jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts respecting divorce, and 
 setting up a regular court of law, the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes 
 Court, to deal with questions between husband and wile. The passing 
 of the Divorce Act was strongly contested in both Houses of Parliament, 
 and indeed was secured at last only by Lord Palmerston's intimating very 
 significantly that he would keep the Houses sitting until the measure had 
 been disposed of. Mr. Gladstone, in particular, offered to the bill a most 
 strenuous opposition. He condemned it on strictly conscientious prrounds. 
 Yet it has to be said, even as a question of conscience, that there was 
 divorce in England before the passing of the Act, the only difference being 
 that the Act made divorce somewhat cheap and rather easy. Before it was the 
 luxury of the rich ; the Act brought it within the reach of almost the poorest 
 of her Majesty's subjects. We confess that we do not see how any great 
 moral or religious principle is violated in the one case any more than in the 
 other. The question at issue was, not whether divorce should be allowed 
 by the law, but only whether it should be high-priced or comparatively 
 inexpensive. It is certainly a public advantage, as it seems to us, that 
 the change in the law has put an end to the debates that used to take 
 place in both Houses of Parliament. When any important bill of divorce 
 was under discussion, the members crowded the House, the case was dis- 
 cussed in all its details as any clause in a bill is now debated ; long 
 speeches were made by those who thought the divorce ought to be granted 
 and those who thought the contrary ; and the time of Parliament was 
 occupied in the edifying discussion as to whether some unhappy woman's 
 shame was or was not clearly established. In one famous case, where a 
 distinguished peer, orator, and statesman sought a divorce from his wife, 
 every point of the evidence was debated in Parliament for night after 
 night. Members spoke in the debate who had known nothing of the case 
 until the bill came before them. One member, perhaps, was taken with a 
 vague sympathy with the wife ; he set about to show that the evidence 
 against her proved nothing. Another sympathised with husbands in 
 general, and made it his business to emphasise every point that told of 
 guilt in the woman. More than one earnest speaker during those 
 debates expressed an ardent hope that the time might come when Parlia- 
 ment should be relieved from the duty of undertaking such unsuitable 
 and scandalous investigations. It must be owned that public decency 
 suffers less by the regulated action of the Divorce Court than it did under 
 this preposterous and abominable system. We cannot help adding too 
 that the Divorce Act, judging by the public use made of it, certainly must 
 be held to have justified itself in a merely practical sense. It seems tr>
 
 164 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxi. 
 
 have been thoroughly appreciated by a grateful public. It was not easy 
 after a while to get judicial power enough to keep the supply of divorces 
 up to the ever-increasing demand. 
 
 Lord Palmerston, then, appears to be furnished with an entirely new 
 lease of power. The little Persian War has been brought to a close ; the 
 country is not disposed to listen to any complaint as to the manner in 
 which it was undertaken. The settlement of the dispute with China pro- 
 mised to be an easy piece of business. The peace party were everywhere 
 overthrown. No one could well have anticipated that within less than a 
 year from the general election a motion made in the House of Commons 
 by one whom it unseated was to compel the Government of Lord 
 Palmerston suddenly to resign office. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 TRANSPORTATION. 
 
 THE year 1857 would have been memorable, if for no other reason, 
 because it saw the abolition of the system of transportation. Trans- 
 portation as a means of getting rid of part of our criminal population 
 dates from the time of Charles II., when the judges gave power for the 
 removal of offenders to the North American Colonies. The fiction of the 
 years coming immediately after took account of this innovation, and one 
 of the most celebrated, if not exactly one of the finest, of Defoe's novels 
 deals with the history of a convict thus sent out to Virginia. Afterwards 
 the revolt of the American colonies and other cases made it necessary to 
 send convicts farther away from civilisation. The punishment of trans- 
 portation was first regularly introduced into our criminal law in 1717 by an 
 Act of Parliament. In 1787 a cargo of criminals was shipped out to 
 Botany Bay, on the eastern shore of New South Wales, and near Sydney, 
 the present thriving capital of the colony. Afterwards the convicts were 
 also sent to Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania ; and to Norfolk Island, a 
 lonely island in the Pacific, some eight hundred miles from New South Wales 
 shore. Norfolk Island became the penal settlement, for the convicted 
 among convicts ; that is to say, criminals who, after transportation to New 
 South Wales, committed new crimes there, might be sent by the Colonial 
 authorities for sterner punishment to Norfolk Island. 
 
 Nothing can seem on the face of it a more satisfactory way of disposing 
 of criminals than the system of transportation. In the first place, it got 
 rid of them, so far as the people at home were concerned ; and for a Jong
 
 1837. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 466 
 
 time that was about all that the people at home cared. Those who had 
 committed crimes not bad enough to be disposed of by the simple and 
 efficient operation of the gallows were got rid of in a manner almost as 
 prompt and effective by the plan of sending them out in shiploads to 
 America or to Australia. It looked, too, as if the system ought to be 
 satisfactory in every way and to everybody. The convicts were provided 
 with a new career, a new country, and a chance of reformation. They 
 were usually after a while released from actual durance in the penal 
 settlement, and allowed conditionally to find employment, and to make 
 themselves, if they could, good citizens. Their labour, it was thought, 
 would be of great service to the colonists. The Act of 1717 recited that 
 ' in many of his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America there was 
 a great want of servants who, by their labour and industry, might be the 
 means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more 
 useful to this nation.' At that time statesmen only thought of the utility 
 of the colonies to this nation. Philanthropy might therefore for a while 
 beguile itself with the belief that the transportation system was a benefit 
 t> the transported as well as to those among whom they were sent. But 
 the colonists very soon began to complain. The convicts who had spent 
 their period of probation in hulks or prisons generally left those homes 
 of horror with nature,s so brutalised as to make their intrusion into any 
 community of decent persons an insufferable nuisance. Pent up in penal 
 settlements by themselves, the convicts turned into demons; drafted into 
 an inhabited colony, they were too numerous to be wholly absorbed by 
 the population, and they carried their contagion along with them. New 
 South Wales began to protest against their presence. Lord John Russell, 
 when Secretary for the Colonies in 1840, ordered that no more of the 
 criminal refuse should be carted out to that region. Then Tasmania had 
 them all to herself for a while. Lord Stanley, when he came to be at the 
 head of the Colonial Office, made an order that the free settlers of 
 Tasmania were not to obtain convict labour at any lower rates than the 
 ordinary market price ; and Tasmania had only put up with the presence of 
 the convicts at all for the sake of getting their labour cheap. Tasmania, 
 therefore, began to protest against being made the refuse ground for our 
 scoundrelism. Mr. Gladstone, while Colonial Secretary, suspended the 
 whole system for a while, but it was renewed soon after. Sir George 
 Grey endeavoured to make the Cape of Good Hope a receptacle for a 
 number of picked convicts; but in 1849 the inhabitants of Cape Colony 
 absolutely refused to allow a shipload of criminals to be discharged upon 
 their shores, and it was manifestly impossible to compel them to receive 
 such disagreeable guests. By this time public opinion in England wa 
 
 VOL. I. H H
 
 466 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. en. xxxi. 
 
 ready to sympathise to the full with any colony which stood out against 
 the degrading system. For a long time there had been growing up a 
 conviction that the transportation system carried intolerable evils with 
 it. Romilly and Bentham had condemned it long before. In 1837 a 
 Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider and 
 report on the system. The Committee included Lord John Russell, Sir 
 Robert Peel, Charles Buller, Sir W. Molesworth, and Lord Howick, 
 afterwards Earl Grey. The evidence they collected settled the question in 
 the minds of all thinking men. The Rev. Walter Clay, son of the famous 
 prison chaplain, Rev. John Clay, says in his memoirs of his father, that 
 probably no volume was ever published in England of which the contents 
 were so loathsome as those of the appendix to the Committee's report. 
 There is not much exaggeration in this. The reader must be left to imagine 
 for himself some of the horrors which would be disclosed by a minute 
 account of what happened in a penal den like Norfolk Island, where a 
 number of utterly bratalised men were leit to herd together without any- 
 thing like beneficent control, without homes, and without the society of 
 women. In Norfolk Island the convicts worked in chains. They were 
 roused at daylight in the morning, and turned out to labour in their irons, 
 and huddled back in their dens at night. In some rare cases convicts 
 were sent directly from England to Norfolk Island ; but as a rule the 
 island was kept as a place of punishment for criminals who, already con- 
 victed in the mother country, were found guilty of new crimes during 
 their residence in New South Wales. 
 
 The condition of things in New South Wales was such as civilisation 
 has not often seen. In Sydney especially it was extraordinary. When 
 the convicts were sent out to the colony they received each in turn, after 
 a certain period of penal probation, a conditional freedom ; in other words, 
 a ticket of leave. They were allowed to work for the colonists, and to 
 support themselves. Anyone who wanted labourers or artizans or servants 
 could apply to the authorities and have convicts assigned to him for the 
 purpose. Female convicts as well as male were thus employed. There 
 was, therefore, a large number of convicts, men and women, moving 
 ibout freely in the active life of Sydney, doing business, working in 
 trades, performing domestic service ; to all appearance occupying the 
 place that artizans and labourers and servants occupy among ourselves. 
 But there was a profound difference, The convict labourers and servants 
 were in reality little better than slaves. They were assigned to masters 
 and mistresses, and they had to work. Stern laws were enacted, and were 
 no doubt required, to keep those terrible subordinates in order. The lash 
 was employed to discipline the men ; the women were practically unman-
 
 1S87. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4b'7 
 
 ageuble. The magistrates had the power, on the complaint of any m.-iHter 
 or mistress, to order a man to be flogged with as many as fifty lashes. 
 Some of the punishment lists remind a reader of the days of slavery in 
 the United States. On every page we come on entries of the flogging of 
 men for disobeying the orders of a master or mistress ; for threatening 
 a fellow-servant, for refusing to rub down the horse or clean the carriage, 
 or some such breach of discipline. A master who was also a magistrate, 
 was not allowed to adjudicate in his own case; but practically it would 
 seem that masters and mistresses could have their convict servants flogged 
 whenever they thought fit. At that time a great many of the native 
 population, ' the Blacks ' as they were called, used to stream into the 
 town of Sydney, as the Indians now come into Salt Lake City or some 
 other western town of America. In some of the outlying houses they 
 would lounge into the kitchens, as beggars used to do in Ireland in old 
 days, looking out for any scraps that might be given to them. It was a 
 common sight then to see half a dozen of the native women, absolutely 
 naked, hanging round the doors of houses where they expected anything. 
 Between the native women and the convicts at large an almost indiscrimin- 
 ate intercourse set in. The 'Black ' men would bring their wives into the 
 town and offer them for a drop of rum or a morsel of tobacco. In this 
 extraordinary society there were these three strands of humanity curiously 
 intertwined. There was the civilised Englishman with his money, his cultun-, 
 his domestic habits ; there was the outcast of English civilisation, the gaol- 
 bird fresh from the prison and the hulks ; and there was the aboriginal naked 
 savage. In the drawing-room sat the wife and daughters of the magistrate ; 
 in the stable was the convict, whose crimes had perhaps been successive 
 burglaries crowned with attempted murder ; in the kitchen were women 
 servants taken from the convict depot and known to be prostitutes ; and 
 hanging round the door were the savage?, men and women. All the evi- 
 dence seems to agree that with hardly any exceptions the women convicts 
 were literally prostitutes. There were some exceptions, which it is well 
 to notice. Witnesses who were questioned on the subject gave it as the 
 result of their experience, that women convicted of any offence whatever 
 in this country and sent out to New South Wales invariably took to 
 profligacy, unless they were Irishwomen. That is to say, it did not 
 follow that an Irish convict woman must necessarily be a profligate 
 woman; it did follow as a matter of fact in the case of other women. 
 Some of the convicts married women of bad character and lived on 
 their immoral earnings, and made no secret of the tact. Many of these 
 husbands boasted that they made their wives keep them in what they 
 considered luxuries by the wages of their sin. Tea and sugar were 
 
 H H 2
 
 168 A HISTOEY OF OUE OWN TIMES. CH. xxxi 
 
 great luxuries to them at that time, and it was a common saying among 
 men of this class that their wives must take care to have the tea and sugar 
 bag filled every day. The convicts soon inoculated the natives with the 
 vilest vices and the foulest diseases of civilisation. Many an English lady 
 found that her woman servants went off in the night somewhere and 
 came back in the morning, and they knew perfectly well that the women 
 had been off on some wild freak of profligacy ; but it was of no use to 
 complain. In the midst of all this it would appear that a few of the con- 
 victs did behave well ; that they kept to work with iron industry, and rose 
 in the world, and were respected. In some cases the wives of convicts went 
 out to New South Wales and started farms or shops, and had their hus- 
 bands assigned to them as servants, and got on tolerably well. But in 
 general the convicts led a life of utter profligacy, and they corrupted all 
 that came within their reach. One convict said to a judge : ' Let a man be 
 what he will, when he comes out here he is soon as bad as the rest ; a 
 man's heart is taken from him, and there is given to him the heart of a 
 beast.' Perpetual profligacy, incessant flogging, this was the combina- 
 tion of the convict's life. Many of the convicts liked the life on the 
 whole, and wrote to friends at home urging them to commit some 
 offence, get transported, and come out to New South Wales. An idle 
 ruffian had often a fine time of it there. This of course does not apply to 
 Norfolk Island. No wretch could be so degraded or so unhappy anywhere 
 else as to find relief in that hideous lair of suffering and abomination. 
 
 Such was the condition of things described to the Committee of the 
 House of Commons in 1837. It is right and even necessary to say that 
 we have passed over almost without allusion some of the most hideous of 
 the revelations. We have kept ourselves to abominations which at all 
 events bear to be spoken of. From the publication of the evidence taken 
 before the Committee anyone might have seen that the transportation 
 system was doomed. It was clear that if any colony made up its mind 
 <;o declare that it would not endure the thing any longer, no English 
 Minister could venture to say that he would force it on the colonists. 
 The doomed and odious system, however, continued for a long time 
 to be put in operation as far as possible. It was most tempting 
 both as to theory and as to practice. It was an excellent thing for the 
 people at home to get rid of so much of their ruffianism; and it was 
 easy to persuade ourselves that the system gave the convicts a chance of 
 reform, and ought to be acceptable to the colonists. 
 
 The colonists, however, made up their minds at last in most places, 
 and would not have any more of our convicts. Only in Western 
 Australia were the people willing to receive them on any conditions, and
 
 18fl. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 469 
 
 \Wstern Australia had but scanty natural resources and could in any oa*c 
 harbour very lew of our outcasts. The discovery of gold in Australia 
 settled the question of those colonies being troubled any more with our 
 transportation system ; for the greatest enthusiast for transportation 
 would hardly propose to send out gangs of criminals to a region 
 glowing with the temptations of gold. There were some thoughts of 
 establishing a convict settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria 
 on the north side of the great Australian Island. Some such scheme was 
 talked of at various intervals. It always, however, broke down on a little 
 examination. One difficulty alone was enough to dispose of it effectually. 
 It was impossible, after the revelations of the Committee of the House of 
 Commons, to have a convict settlement of men alone ; and if it was pro- 
 posed to found a colony, where were the women to come from ? Were 
 respectable English and Irish girls to be enticed to go out and become 
 the wives of convicts ? What statesman would make such a proposal ' 
 The wildest projects were suggested. Let the convicts marry the savago 
 women, one ingenious person suggested. Unfortunately in the places 
 thought most suitable for a settlement there happened to be no savage 
 women. Let the convict men be married to convict women, said another 
 philosopher. But even if any Colonial Minister could have been found 
 hardy enough to approach Parliament with a scheme for the foundation 
 of a colony on the basis of common crime, it had to be said that there 
 were not nearly enough of convict women to supply brides for even a 
 tolerable proportion of the convict men. Another suggestion it is only 
 necessary to mention for the purpose of showing to what lengths the 
 votaries of an idea will go in their effort to make it fit in with the actual 
 conditions of things. There were persons who thought it would not be a 
 bad plan to get rid of two nuisances at once, our convicts and a portion 
 of what is euphuistically termed our ' social evil,' by founding a penal 
 settlement on some lonely shore, and sending out cargoes of the abandoned 
 women of our large towns to be the wives of the present and the mothers 
 of the future colonists. When it came to propositions of this kind it was 
 clear that there was an end to any serious discussion as to the possibility 
 of founding a convict settlement. As late as 1856 Committees of both 
 Houses of Parliament declared themselves greatly in favour of the trans- 
 portation system that is, of some transportation system, of an ideal trans- 
 portation system ; but also recorded their conviction that it would be im- 
 possible to carry on the known system any longer. 
 
 The question then arose what was England to do with the criminals 
 whom up to that time she had been able to shovel out of her way. All 
 the receptacles were closed but Western Australia, and that counted for
 
 470 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxi. 
 
 almost nothing. Some prisoners were then, and since, sent out for a part 
 of their term to Gibraltar and Bermuda; but they were always brought 
 back to this country to be discharged, so that they may be considered as 
 forming a part of the ordinary class of criminals kept in detention here. 
 The transportation system was found to carry evils in its train which did 
 not directly belong to its own organisation. It had been for a long time 
 the practice of England and Scotland to send out to a colony only those 
 who were transported for ten years and upwards, and to retain those con- 
 demned for shorter periods in the hulks and other convict prisons. In 
 these hideous hulks the convicts were huddled together very much as in 
 Norfolk Island, with scarcely any superintendence or discipline, and the 
 result was th? t they became what were called with hardly any exaggeration 
 ' floating hells.' It was quite clear that the whole system of our dealings 
 with our convicts must be revised and reorganised. In 1853 the Govern- 
 ment took a step which has been well described as an avowal that we must 
 take the complete charge of our criminals upon ourselves. A bill was 
 brought in by the Ministry to substitute penal servitude for transportation, 
 unless in cases where the sentence was for fourteen years and upwards. 
 The bill reduced the scale of punishment ; that is to say, made a shorter 
 period of penal servitude supply the place of a longer term of transport- 
 ation. Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary at this time. It was during 
 that curious episode in his career described in a former volume when he 
 adopted, if such an expression may be used, the business of Home 
 Secretary in order, as he put it, to learn how to deal with the concerns of 
 the country internally, and to be brought in contact with his fellow- 
 countrymen. He threw all his characteristic energy into the work of 
 carrying through the measure for the establishment of a new system of 
 secondary punishments. It was during the passing of the bill through the 
 House of Lords that Lord Grey suggested the introduction of a modifi- 
 cation of the ticket-of-leave system which was in practice in the colonies 
 The principle of the ticket-of-leave was that the convict should not be 
 kept in custody during the whole period of his sentence, but that he 
 should be allowed to pass through a period of conditional liberty before he 
 obtained his full and unrestricted freedom. Lord Grey also urged that 
 the sentences to penal servitude should correspond in length with sentences 
 for transportation. The Government would not accept this latter sug- 
 gestion, but they adopted the principle of the ticket-of-leave. The bill 
 was introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Cranworth, the Lord 
 Chancellor. When it came down to the House of Commons there was 
 Borne objection made to the ticket-of-leave clauses, but the Government 
 carried them through. The effect of the measure was to substitute penu!
 
 1866. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 471 
 
 servitude for transportation, in ;ill cases except those where the sentence of 
 transportation was for fourteen years and upwards. Now there can he no 
 doubt that the principle of the ticket- of-leave is excellent Hut it proved 
 on its first trial in this country the most utter delusion. It got no fair 
 chance at all. It was understood by the whole English public that the 
 object of the ticket-of-leave was to enable the authorities to give a con- 
 ditional discharge from custody to a man who had in some way proved 
 his fitness for such a relaxation of punishment, and that the eyes of the 
 police would be on him even during the period of his conditional release. 
 This was in fact the construction put on the Act in Ireland, where accord- 
 ingly the ticket-of-leave system was worked with the most complete suc- 
 cess. Under the management of Sir Walter Crofton, chairman of the 
 Board of Prison Directors, the principle was applied exactly as anyone 
 might have supposed it would be applied everywhere, and as indeed the 
 very conditions endorsed on the ticket-of-leave distinctly suggested. The 
 convicts in Ireland were kept away from the general community in a little 
 penal settlement near Dublin ; they were put at first to hard, monotonous, 
 and weary labour ; they were then encouraged to believe that with energy 
 and good conduct they could gradually obtain relaxation of punishment, 
 and even some small rewards ; they were subjected to a process of really re- 
 forming discipline ; they got their conditional freedom as soon as they had 
 satisfactorily proved that they deserved and were fit for it ; but even then 
 they had to report themselves periodically to the police, and they knew 
 that if they were seen to be relapsing into old habits and old companion- 
 ships they were certain to be sent back to the penal settlement to begin the 
 hard work over again. The result was substantial and lasting reform. 
 It was easy for the men who were let out conditionally to obtain employ- 
 ment. A man who had Sir Walter Crofton's ticket- of-ieave was known 
 by that very fact to have given earnest of good purpose and steady cha- 
 racter. The system in Ireland was therefore all that its authors could have 
 wished it to be. But for some inscrutable reason the Act was interpreted 
 in this country as simply giving every convict a right, after a certain 
 period of detention, to claim a ticket-of-leave provided he had not grossly 
 violated any of the regulations of the prison, or misconducted himself in 
 some outrageous manner. In 1856 Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, 
 told the House of Commons that there never was a more fallacious ide- 
 than the supposition that a ticket-of-leave was a certificate of good cha- 
 racter, and that a man only obtained such a ticket if lie could prove; that 
 he had reformed. A ticket-of-leave, he went on to explain, was indeed 
 withheld in the case of very bad conduct; but in any ordinary case the 
 convicts, 'unless they have transgressed the prison rules, and acted in such
 
 472 A HISTOEY OF OUB OWN TIMES. en. xxxi. 
 
 a manner as to incur an unfavourable report from the prison authorities, 
 are, after a stated period of imprisonment, entitled as a matter of course to a 
 ticket-of-leave.' 
 
 It would be superfluous to examine the working of such a system as 
 that which Sir George Grey described. A number of scoundrels whom 
 the judges had sentenced to be kept in durance for so many years were 
 without any conceivable reason turned loose upon society long before the 
 expiration of their sentence. They were in England literally turned 
 loose upon society, for it was held by the authorities here that it might 
 possibly interfere with, the chance of a gaol-bird's getting employment, if 
 he were seen to be watched by the police. The police therefore were 
 considerately ordered to refrain from looking after them. 'I knew you 
 once,' says the hero of a poem by Mr. Browning, ' but in Paradise, should 
 we meet, I will pass nor turn my face.' The police were ordered to act 
 thus discreetly if they saw Bill Sykes asking for employment in some 
 wealthy and quiet household. They certainly knew him once, but now 
 they were to pass nor turn their face. Nothing, surely, that we know of 
 the internal arrangements of Timbuctoo, to adopt the words of Sydney 
 Smith, warrants us in supposing that such a system would have been en- 
 dured there for a year. Fifty per cent, of the ruffians released on ticket- 
 of-leave were afterwards brought up for new crimes, and convicted over 
 again. Of those who although not actually convicted were believed to 
 have relapsed into their old habits, from sixty to seventy per cent, relapsed 
 within the first year of their liberation. Baron Bramwell stated from the 
 bench that he had had instances of criminals coming before him who had 
 three sentences overlapping each other. The convict was set free on 
 ticket-of-leave, convicted of some new crime, and re-committed to prison ; 
 released again on ticket-of-leave, and convicted once again, before the 
 period of his original sentence had expired. An alarm sprang up in 
 England ; and like all alarms it was supported both by exaggeration and 
 misconception. The system pursued with the convicts was bad enough; 
 but tne popular impression ascribed to the ticket-of-leave men every crime 
 committed by anyone who had been previously convicted and imprisoned. 
 A man who had worked out the whole of his sentence, and who therefore 
 had to be discharged, committed some crime immediately after. Excited 
 public opinion described it as a crime committed by a ticket-of-leave man. 
 Two Committees eat, as has already been said, in 1856. The result of the 
 public alarm and the Parliamentary reconsideration ot' the whole subject, 
 was the bill brought in by Sir George Grey in 1857. This measure ex- 
 tended the provisions of the Act of 1853 by substituting in all cases a 
 sentence of penal servitude for one of transportation. It extended the
 
 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMK8. 473 
 
 limits of the penal servitude sentences by making them correspond with 
 the terms of: transportation to which men had previously been sentenced. 
 It gave power also to pass sentences of penal servitude for shorter periods 
 than waa allowed by former legislation, allowing penal servitude for as 
 short a period as three years. It attached to all sentences of penal servi- 
 tude the liability to be removed from this country to places beyond seas 
 fitted for their reception ; and it restricted the range of the remission of 
 sentences. The Act, it will be seen, abolished the old-fashioned transport- 
 ation system altogether, but it left the power to the authorities to have 
 penal servitude carried out in any of the colonies where it might be thought 
 expedient. The Government had still some idea of utilising Western 
 Australia for some of our offenders. But nothing came of this plan, or 
 of the clause in the new Act which was passed to favour it; and as a 
 matter of fact transportation was abolished. How the amended legislation 
 worked in other respects we shall have an opportunity of examining here- 
 after. 
 
 Transportation waa not the only familiar institution which came to at 
 end in this year. The Gretna Green marriages became illegal in lH. r )7, 
 their doom having been fixed for that time by an Act passed in the previous 
 session. Thenceforward such marriages were unlawful, unless one of the 
 parties had lived at least twenty-one days previously in Scotland. The 
 hurried flight to the border, the post-chaise and the panting steeds, the 
 excited lovers, the pursuing father, passed away into tradition. Lydia 
 Languish had to reconcile herself to the licence and the blessing, and even 
 the writers of fiction might have given up without a sigh an incident which 
 had grown wearisome in romance long before it ceased to be interesting in 
 reality. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 TI1K SEPOY. 
 
 ON the 23rd of June, 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the battle of 
 Plassey was celebrated in London. One object of the celebration was to 
 obtain the means of raising a monument to Clive in his native county. 
 At such a meeting it was but natural that a good deal should be said 
 about the existing condition of India, and the prospects of that great 
 empire which the genius and the daring of Clive had gone so tar to secure 
 for the English Crown. It does not appear, however, as if any alarm was 
 expressed with regard to the state of tilings in Bengal, or as if any of the 
 noblemen and gentlemen present believed that at that very moment India
 
 474 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxn. 
 
 was passing through a crisis more serious than Clive himself had had to 
 sncounter. Indeed, a month or so before a Bombay journal had congrat- 
 ulated itself on the fact that India was quiet ' throughout.' Yet at the 
 hour when the Plassey celebration was going on the great Indian Mutiny 
 was already six weeks old, had already assumed full and distinctive propor- 
 tions, was already known in India to be a convulsion destined to shake to 
 its foundations the whole fabric of British rule in Hindostan. A few 
 evenings after the celebration there was some cursory and casual discussion 
 in Parliament about the doubtful news that had begun to arrive from 
 India ; but as yet no Englishman at home took serious thought of the 
 matter. The news came at last with a rush. 
 
 Never in our time, never probably at any time, came such news upon 
 England as the first full story of the outbreak in India. It came with 
 terrible, not unnatural, exaggeration. England was horror-stricken by the 
 stories of wholesale massacres of English women and children ; of the 
 most abominable tortures, the most degrading outrages inflicted upon English 
 matrons and maidens. The newspapers rau over with the most horrifying 
 and the most circumstantial accounts of how English ladies of the highest 
 refinement were dragged naked through the streets of Delhi, and were 
 paraded in their nakedness before the eyes of the aged King of Delhi, in 
 order that his hatred might be feasted with the sight of the shame and 
 agony of the captives. Descriptions were given, to which it is unnecessary 
 to make any special allusions now, of the vile mutilations and tortures 
 inflicted on Englishwomen to glut the vengeance of the tyrant. The pen 
 of another Procopius could alone have done full justice to the narratives 
 which were poured in day after day upon the shuddering ears of English- 
 men, until all thought even of the safety of the Indian Empire was 
 swallowed up in a wild longing for revenge on the whole seed, breed, and 
 race of the mutinous people who had tortured and outraged our country- 
 women. It was not till the danger was all over, and British arms had 
 reconquered Northern India, that England learned the truth with regard 
 to these alleged outrages and tortures. Let us dispose of this most pain- 
 ful part of the terrible story at the very beginning, and once for all. 
 During the Indian Mutiny the blood of innocent women and children was 
 cruelly and lavishly spilt . on one memorable occasion with a bloodthirsti- 
 ness that might have beloiiged to the most savage times of mediaeval war- 
 fare. But there were no outrages, in the common acceptation, upon 
 women. No Englishwomen were stripped or dishonoured, or purposely 
 mutilated. As to this fact all historians of the mutiny are agreed. 
 
 But if the first stories of the outbreak that reached England dealt in 
 exaggerations of this kind, the^ do not seem to have exaggerated, they do
 
 1867. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 47/i 
 
 not seem to have even adequately appreciated, the nature of the cri.sif 
 with which England was suddenly called upon to deal. The fact wafl, 
 that throughout the greater part of the north and north-west of tho great 
 Indian peninsula there was a rebellion of the native races against English 
 power. It was not alone the Sepoys who rose in revolt. It, was not by 
 any means a merely military mutiny. It was a combination, whether the 
 growth of deliberate design and long preparation, or the .sudden birth oi 
 chance and unexpected opportunity a combination of military grievance, 
 national hatred and religious fanaticism, against, the English occupiers of 
 India. The native princes and the native soldiers were in it. The 
 Mahomedan and the Hindoo forgot their own religious antipathies to join 
 against the Christian. Hatred and panic were the stimulants of that great 
 rebellious movement. The quarrel about the greased cartridges was but 
 the chance spark flung in among all the combustible material. If that 
 spark had riot lighted it, some other would have done the work. In fact, 
 there are thoughtful and well-informed historians who believe that the 
 incident of the greased cartridges was a fortunate one for our people ; that 
 coming as it did it precipitated unexpectedly a great convulsion which, 
 occurring later, and as the result of more gradual operations, might have 
 been far more dangerous to the perpetuity of our rule. 
 
 Let us first see what were the actual facts of the outbreak. When the 
 improved (Enfield) rifle was introduced into the Indian army, the idea got 
 abroad that the cartridges were made up in paper greased with a mixture 
 of cow's fat and hog's lard. It appears that the paper was actually 
 greased, but not with any such material as that which religious alarm 
 suggested to the native troops. Now a mixture of cow's fat and hog's 
 lard would have been, above all other things, unsuitable for use in cart- 
 ridges to be distributed among our Sepoys ; for the Hindoo regards the cow 
 with religious veneration, and the Mahomedan looks upon the hog with 
 utter loathing. In the mind of the former something sacred to him was 
 profaned; in that of the latter something unclean and abominable was 
 forced upon his daily use. It was in 185G that the new rifles were sent 
 out from England, and the murmur against their use began at once. 
 Varioiis efforts were made to allay the panic among the native troops. The 
 use of the cartridges complained of was discontinued by orders issued in 
 January, 1857. The Governor-General sent out a proclamation in the 
 following May, assuring the army of Bengal that the tales told to them of 
 offence to their religion or injury to their caste being meditated by the 
 Government of India, were all malicious inventions and falsehoods. Still 
 the idea was strong among the troops that some design against their religion 
 was meditated. A mutinous spirit began to spread itself abroad. In March
 
 176 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxu. 
 
 borne ol the native regiments had to be disbanded. In April some execu- 
 tions of Sepoys took place for gross and open mutiny. In the same month 
 several of the Bengal native cavalry in Meerut refused to use the cart- 
 ridges served out to them, although they had been authoritatively assured 
 that the paper in which the cartridges were wrapped had never been 
 touched by any offensive material. On May 9 these men were sent to the 
 gaol. They had been tried by court-martial, and were sentenced, eightv 
 of them, to imprisonment and hard labour for ten years, the remaining fivt 
 to a similar punishment for six years. They had chains put on them IE 
 the presence of their comrades, who no doubt regarded them as martyrs 
 to their religious faith, and they were thus publicly marched off to 
 the common gaol. The guard placed over the gaol actually consisted of 
 Sepoys. 
 
 The following day, Sunday, May 10, was memorable. The native 
 troops in Meerut broke into open mutiny. The summa dies, the inelucta- 
 bile tempus had come. They fired upon their officers, killed a colonel and 
 others, broke into the gaol, released their comrades, and massacred several 
 of the European inhabitants. The European troops rallied and drove 
 them from their cantonments or barracks. Then came the momentous 
 event, the turning point of the mutiny ; the act that marked out its cha- 
 racter, and made it what it afterwards became. Meerut is an important 
 military station between the Ganges and the Jumna, thirty-eight miles 
 north-east from Delhi. In the vast palace of Delhi, almost a city in itself, 
 a reeking Alsatia of lawless and privileged vice and crime, lived the aged 
 King of Delhi, as he was called ; the disestablished, but not wholy disen- 
 dowed, sovereign, the descendant of the great Timour, the last representa- 
 tive of the Grand Mogul. The mutineers fled along the road to Delhi ; 
 and some evil fate directed that they were not to be pursued or stopped 
 on their way. Unchecked, unpursued, they burst into Delhi, and swarmed 
 into the precincts of the palace of the king. They claimed his protection ; 
 they insisted upon his accepting their cause and themselves. They pro- 
 claimed him Emperor of India, and planted the standard of rebellion 
 Against English rule on the battlements of his palace. They had found in 
 one moment a leader, a, flag, and a cause, and the mutiny was transfigured 
 into a revolutionary war. The Srpoy troops, in the city and the canton- 
 ments on the Delhi ridge, two miles off, and overlooking the city, at once 
 began to cast in their lot with the mutineers. The poor old puppet whom 
 they set up as their emperor was some eighty years of age ; a feeble 
 creature, believed to have a mild taste for poetry and weak debauchery. 
 He had long been merely a pensioner of the East India Company. During 
 the early intrigues and struggles between the English and French in India
 
 1857. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 477 
 
 the Company had taken the sovereigns of Delhi under their protection, 
 nominally to save them from the aggressiveness of the rival power; and, 
 as might be expected, the Delhi monarchs soon became mere pensioriaricfl 
 of the British authorities. It had even been determined that after the 
 old king's death a different arrangement should be made; that the title of 
 king would not be allowed any longer, and that the privileges of the palace, 
 the occupants of which were thus far allowed to be a law to themselves, 
 should be restricted or abolished. A British Commissioner directed affairs 
 in the city, and British troops were quartered on the Delhi ridge outside. 
 Still the king was living, and was called a king. He was the representa- 
 tive of the great dynasty whose name and effigies had been borne by all 
 the coin of India until within some twenty years before. He stood for 
 legitimacy and divine right; and he supplied all the various factious and 
 sects of which the mutiny was composed, or to be composed, with a visible 
 and an acceptable head. If the mutineers flying from Meerut had been 
 promptly pursued and dispersed, or captured, before they reached Delhi, 
 the tale we have to tell might have been much shorter and very different. 
 But when they reached, unchecked, the Jumna glittering in the morning 
 '.jght, when they swarmed across the bridge of boats that spanned it, and 
 when at length they clamoured under the windows of the palace that they had 
 come to restore the rule of the Delhi dynasty, they had all unconsciously 
 seized one of the great critical moments of history, and converted a mili- 
 tary mutiny into a national and religious war. 
 
 This is the manner in which the Indian Rebellion began and assumed 
 its distinct character. But this dry statement of facts would go a very 
 short way towards explaining how the mutiny of a few regiments came tc 
 assume the aspect of a rebellion. Mutinies were not novelties in India. 
 There had been some very serious outbreaks before the time of the greased 
 cartridges. The European officers of the Company had them selves 
 mutinied in Bengal nearly a century before ; and that time the Sepoys 
 stood firm by the Company whose salt they had eaten. There was ? 
 more general and serious mutiny at Vellore, near Madras, in 1806 ; and 
 the sons of the famous Tippoo Sahib took part with it, and endeavoured 
 to make it the. means of regaining the forfeited power of their house. It 
 had to be dealt with as if it were a war, and Vellore had to be recaptured. 
 In 1849 a Bengal regiment seized a fortress near Lahore. Sir Charles 
 Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, once protested that thirty regiments of 
 the Bengal army were ripe for revolt. Napier, however, seems to have 
 thought only of military mutiny, and not of religious and political re- 
 bellion. At Meerut itself, the very cradle of the outbreak, a pamphlet 
 was published in 1851 by Colonel Hodgson, to argue that the admission
 
 A HIS TOR OF OUR OWN TIMES. CK. xxxn. 
 
 of the priestly caste too freely into the Bengal army would be the means 
 of fomenting sedition among the native troops. But there was a combina- 
 tion of circumstances at work to bring about such a revolt as Napier 
 never dreamed of; a revolt as different from the outbreak he contem- 
 plated as the French Revolution differed from the Mutiny of the Nore. 
 These causes affected variously but at once the army, the princes, and the 
 populations of India. 
 
 ' The causes and motives for sedition,' says Bacon and the words 
 have been cited with much appropriateness and effect by Sir J. W. Kaye 
 in his ' History of the Sepoy War ' ' are innovations in religion, taxes, 
 alteration of laws and customs, breaking of privileges, general oppression, 
 advancement of unworthy persons, strangers, deaths, disbanded soldiers, 
 factions grown desperate, and whatsoever in offending people joineth and 
 knitteth them in a common cause.' Not all these various impulses to re- 
 bellion were stirring perhaps in India, but assuredly many, possibly the 
 majority, of them were at work. As is usual in such cases too, it 
 happened that many changes made, nay, many privileges disinterestedly 
 conferred by the ruling power in India for the benefit and pleasure of the 
 native levies, turned into other causes and stimulants of sedition and re- 
 bellion. Let us speak first of the army. The Bengal army was very 
 different in its constitution and conditions from that of Bombay or Madras, 
 the other great divisions of Indian government at that time. In the 
 Bengal army, the Hindoo Sepoys were far more numerous than the 
 Mahomedans, and were chiefly Brahmins of high caste ; while in Madras 
 and Bombay the army was made up, as the Bengal regiments are now, of 
 men of all sects and races without discrimination. Until the very year 
 before the Mutiny the Bengal soldier was only enlisted for service in 
 India, and was exempted from any liability to be sent across the seas ; 
 across the black water which the Sepoy dreaded and hated to have to 
 cross. No such exemption was allowed to the soldiers of Bombay or 
 Madras; and in July 1856, an order was issued by the military autho- 
 rities to the effect that future enlistments in Bengal should be for service 
 anywhere without limitation. Thus the Bengal Sepoy had not only been 
 put in the position of a privileged and pampered favourite, but he had 
 been subjected to the indignity and disappointment of seeing his privileges 
 taken away from him. He was indeed an excellent soldier, and was 
 naturally made a favourite by many of his commanders. But he was 
 very proud, and was rigidly tenacious of what he considered his rights. 
 He lived apart with hia numerous and almost limitless family, representing 
 all grades of relationship; he cooked his food apart and ate it apart; he 
 acknowledged one set of governing principles while he was on parade, and
 
 1857. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 479 
 
 had a totally different code of customs and laws and morals to regulate 
 his private life. The tide of blood relationship was very strong with thf 
 Sepoy. The elder Sepoy always took good care to keep hi regiment well 
 supplied with recruits from among his own family. As the Highland 
 Bergi-ant in the British army endeavours to have as many aw possible of 
 his kith and clan in the regiment with himself; as the Irishman in the 
 New York police force is anxious to get as many of his friends and 
 fellow countrymen as may be into the same ranks, so the Sepoy did his 
 best to surround himself with men of his blood find of his ways. There was 
 therefore the spirit of a clan and of a sect pervading the Sepoy regiments; a 
 strong current flowing beneath the stream of superficial military discipline 
 and esprit de corps. The Sepoy had many privileges denied to his fellow- 
 religionists who were not in the military ranks. Let it be added that ho 
 was very often deeply in debt ; that his pay was frequently mortgaged to 
 usurers who hung on him as the crimps do upon a sailor in one of our 
 seaport towns ; and that therefore he had something of Catiline's reason 
 for desiring a general upset and a clearing off of old responsibilities. 
 
 But. we must above all other things take into account, when consider- 
 ing the position of the Hindoo Sepoy, the influence of the tremendous 
 institution of caste. An Englishman or European of any country will 
 have to call his imaginative faculties somewhat vigorously to his aid in 
 order to get even an idea of the power of this monstrous superstition. 
 The man who by the merest accident, by the slightest contact with any- 
 thing that defiled, had lost caste, was excommunicated from among the 
 living, and was held to be for evermore accurst of God. His dearest 
 friend, his nearest relation, shrank back from him in alarm and abhorrence. 
 When Helen Macgregor, in Scott's romance, would express her sense of 
 the degradation that had been put upon her, she declares that her mother's 
 bones would shrink away from her in the grave, if her corpse were to be 
 laid beside them. The Sepoy fully believed that his mothers' bones ought 
 to shrink away from contact with the polluted body of the son who had 
 lost caste. Now, it had become from various causes a strong suspicion in 
 the mind of the Sepoy that there was a deliberate purpose in the minds ol 
 the English rulers of the country to defile the Hindoos, and to bring them 
 all to the dead level of one caste or no caste. The suspicion in part arose 
 out of the fact that this institution of caste, penetrating as it did so subtly 
 and so universally into all the business of life, could not but come into 
 frequent collision with any system of European military and civil disci- 
 pline, however carefully and considerately managed. No doubt there waa 
 in many instances a lack of consideration shown for the Hindoo's peculiar 
 and very perplexing tenets. The Englishman is not usually a very imagi-
 
 480 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxn. 
 
 native personage ; nor is he rich in those sympathetic instincts which 
 might enable a ruler to enter into and make allowance for the influence of 
 sentiments and usages widely different from his own. To many a man 
 fresh from the ways of England, the Hindoo doctrines and practices 
 appeared so ineffably absurd that he could not believe any human beings 
 were serious in their devotion to them, and he took no pains to conceal 
 his opinion as to the absurdity of the creed, and the hypocrisy of those 
 who professed it. Some of the elder officers and civilians were imbued 
 very strongly with a conviction that the work of open, and what we may 
 call aggressive, proselytism, was part of the duty of a Christian ; and in 
 the best faith and with the purest intentions they thus strengthened the 
 growing suspicion that the mind of the authorities was set on the defile- 
 ment of the Hindcos. Nor was it among the Hindoos alone that the 
 alarm began to be spread abroad. It was the conviction of the Mahome- 
 dans that their faith and their rites were to be tampered with as well. It 
 was whispered among them everywhere that the peculiar baptismal custom 
 of the Mahomedans was to be suppressed by law, and that Mahomedan 
 women were to be compelled to go unveiled in public. The slightest 
 alterations in any system gave fresh confirmation to the suspicions that 
 were afloat among the Hindoos and Mussulmans. When a change was 
 made in the arrangements of the prisons, and the native prisoners were no 
 longer allowed to cook for themselves, a murmur went abroad that this 
 was the first overt act in the conspiracy to destroy the caste, and with it 
 the bodies and souls of the Hindoos. Another change must be noticed 
 too. At one time it was intended that the native troops should be com- 
 manded for the most part by native officers. The men would, therefore, 
 have had something like sufficient security that their religious scruples 
 were regarded and respected. But by degrees the clever, pushing, and 
 capable Briton began to monopolise the officers' posts everywhere. The 
 natives were shouldered out of the high positions, until at length it be- 
 came practically an army of native rank and file commanded by English- 
 men. If we remember that a Hindoo sergeant of lower caste would, 
 when off parade, often abase himself with his forehead in the dust before 
 a Sepoy private who belonged to the Brahmin order, we shall have some 
 idea of the perpetual collision between military discipline and religious 
 principle which affected the Hindoo members of an army almost exclu- 
 sively commanded by Europeans and Christians. 
 
 There was, however, yet another influence, and one of tremendous 
 importance in determining the set of that otherwise vague current of 
 feeling which threatened to disturb the tranquil permanence of English 
 rule in ^ndia. We have spoken of the army and of it<i religi us scruples :
 
 1867. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMKS. 481 
 
 we must now speak of the territorial and political influences which 
 affected the princes and the populations of India. There had been just 
 before the outbreak of the Mutiny a wholesale removal of the landmarks 
 a striking application of a bold and thorough policy of annexation ; a 
 gigantic system of reorganisation applied to the territorial arrangement* 
 of the north and north-west of the great Indian peninsula. A master-spirit 
 had been at work at the reconstruction of India; and if you cannot make 
 revolutions with rosewater, neither can you make them without reaction. 
 Lord Dalhousie had not long left India on the appointment of Lord 
 Canning to the Governor-Generalship when the Mutiny broke out. 
 Lord Dalhousie was a man of commanding energy, of indomitable 
 courage, with the intellect of a ruler of men, and the spirit of a conqueror. 
 The statesmen of India perform their parts upon a vast stage, and yet 
 they are to the world in general somewhat like the actors in a provincial 
 theatre. They do not get the fame of their work and their merits. Men 
 nave arisen in India whose deeds, if done in Europe, vould have ranked 
 them at least with the Richelieus and Bismarcks of history, if not actually 
 with, the Cissars and Charlemagnes ; and who are yet condemned to what 
 may almost be called a merely local renown ; a record on the roll of great 
 officials. Lord Dalhousie was undoubtedly a great man. He had had 
 some Parliamentary experience in England and in both Houses ; and he 
 had been Vice-President and subsequently President of the Board of 
 Trade under Sir Eobert Peel. He had taken great interest in the framing 
 of regulations for the railway legislation of the mania season of 1844 and 
 1845. Towards the close of 1847 Lord Hardinge was recalled from 
 India, and Lord Dalhousie was sent out in his place. Never was there in 
 any country an administration of more successful activity than that of 
 Lord Dalhousie. He introduced cheap postage into India ; he made rail- 
 ways ; he set up lines of electric telegraph. Within fifteen months, 
 according to one of his biographers, the telegraph was in operation from 
 Calcutta to Agra, thence to Attock on the Indus, and again from Agra to 
 Bombay and Madras. He devoted much of his attention to irrigation, to 
 the making of great roads, to the work of the Ganges Canal. He was the 
 founder of a comprehensive system of native education ; especially female 
 education, a matter so difficult and delicate in a country like India. He put 
 down infanticide and the odious and extraordinary Thug system, and 
 he carried out with vigour Lord William Bentinck's Act for the suppression 
 of the Suttee or burning of widows on the funeral pile of their husbands. 
 These are only some of the evidences of his unresting, all-conquering 
 energy. They are but illustrative ; they are far indeed from being ex- 
 haustive even as a catalogue. But Lord Dalhousie was not wholly eu- 
 
 VOL. 1, I l
 
 482 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxn. 
 
 gaged in such works as these. Indeed, his noble and glorious triumphs over 
 material, intellectual, and moral obstacles run some risk of being forgot- 
 ten or overlooked by the casual reader of history in the storm of that 
 fierce controversy which his other enterprises called forth. During his 
 few years of office he annexed the Punjaub, he incorporated part of the 
 Burmese territory in our dominions ; he annexed Nagpore, Sattara, 
 Jhansi, Berar, and Oudh. We are not called upon here to consider in 
 detail the circumstances of each of these annexations, or to ask the reader 
 to pass judgment on the motives and the policy of Lord Dalhousie. It is 
 fair to say that he was not by any means the mere imperial proconsul he 
 is often represented to be, thirsty with the ardour of a Roman conqueror 
 to enlarge the territory of his own State at any risk or any sacrifice of 
 principle. There was reason enough to make out a plausible case for even 
 the most questionable of his annexations ; and in one or two instances he 
 seems only to have resolved on annexation reluctantly and because things 
 had come to that pass that he saw no other safe alternative left to him. 
 But his own general policy is properly expressed in his own words : ' We 
 are lords-paramount of India, and our policy is to acquire as direct a 
 dominion over the territories in possession of the native princes as we 
 already hold over the other half of India.' Such a principle as this 
 could only conduct in the vast majority of cases to a course of direct an- 
 nexation, let the ruler begin by disavowing it as he will. In the Punjaub 
 the annexation was provoked in the beginning, as so many such retribu- 
 tions have been in India, by the murder of some of our officers, sanctioned, 
 if not actually ordered, by a native prince. Lord Dalhousie marched a 
 force into the Punjaub. This land, ' the land of the five waters,' lies at the 
 gateway of Hindostan, and was peopled by Mussulmans, Hindoos, and 
 Sikhs, the latter a new sect of reformed Hindoos. We found arrayed 
 against us not only the Sikhs, but our old enemies the Afghans. Lord 
 Gough was in command of our forces. He fought rashly and disastrously 
 the famous battle of Chillianwallah. The plain truth may as well be 
 spoken out without periphrasis : he was defeated. But before the outcry 
 raised in India and in England over this calamity had begun to subside, 
 he had wholly recovered our position and prestige by the complete defeat 
 which he inflicted upon the enemy at Goojrat. Never was a victory more 
 complete in itself or more promptly and effectively followed up. The 
 Sikhs were crushed ; the Afghans were driven in wild rout back across 
 their savage passes ; and Lord Dalhousio -annexed the Punjaub. Repre- 
 sented as one token of his conquest the famous diamond, the Koh-i-Noor 
 mrrenderrd in evidence of submission by the Maharajah of Lahore, to 
 Ae Crown of England.
 
 1R67- A. HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 483 
 
 Lord Dalhousie annexed Oudh on the ground that the East India 
 Company had bound themselves to defend the sovereigns of Oudh against 
 foreign and domestic enemies on condition that the State should be 
 governed in such a manner as to render the lives and property of its 
 population safe ; and that while the Company performed their part of the 
 contract, the King of Oudh so governed his dominions as to make his rule 
 a curse to his own people and to all neighbouring territories. Other 
 excuses or justifications there were of course in the case of each other 
 annexation ; and we shall yet hear some more of what came of the 
 annexation of Sattara and Jhansi. If, however, each of these acts of 
 policy were not only justifiable but actually inevitable, none the less mugt 
 a succession of such acts produce a profound emotion among the races in 
 whose midst they were accomplished. Lord Dalhousie wanted one quality 
 of a truly great man : he lacked imagination. He had not that dramatic 
 instinct, that fine sympathetic insight, by which a statesman is enabled to 
 understand the feelings of races and men differing wholly in education, 
 habits, and principles from himself. He appeared to be under the im- 
 pression that when once a ruler had established among whatever foreign 
 people a system of government or of society better than that which he 
 found existing there, he might count on obtaining their instant apprecia- 
 tion of his work and their gratefulness for it. The Sovereign of Oudh 
 was undoubtedly a very bad ruler. His governing system, if it ought to 
 be dignified by such a name, was a combination of anarchy and robbery. 
 The chiefs of Oudh were reivers and bandits; the king was the head 
 reiver and bandit. But human nature, even in the west, is not so 
 constituted as to render a population always and at once grateful 
 to any powerful stranger who uproots their old and bad systems 
 and imposes a better on them by force of arms. ' A tyrant, but our 
 masters then were still at least our countrymen,' is the faithful ex- 
 pression of a sentiment which had embarrassed energetic reformers 
 before the days of Lord Dalhousie. The populations of India became 
 stricken with alarm as they saw their native princes thus successively 
 dethroned. The subversion of thrones, the annexation of States, seemed 
 to them naturally enough to form part of that vast scheme for rooting out 
 all the religions and systems of India, concerning which so many vague 
 forebodings had darkly warned the land. Many of our Sepoys came from 
 Oudh and other annexed territories ; and little reason as they might have 
 had for any personal attachments to the subverted dynasties, they yet felt 
 that national resentment which any manner of foreign intervention is 
 almost certain to provoke. 
 
 There were peculiar reasons too why, if religious and political distrunt 
 
 ii 2
 
 484 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxn. 
 
 did prevail, the moment of Lord Canning's accession to the supreme 
 authority in India should seem inviting and favourable for schemes of 
 sedition. The Afghan war had told the Sepoy that British troops are 
 not absolutely invincible in battle. The impression produced almost 
 everywhere in India by the Crimean War was a conviction that the strength 
 of England was on the wane. The stories of our disasters in the Crimea 
 had gone abroad, adorned with immense exaggerations, among all the 
 native populations of Hindostan. Any successes that the Russians had 
 had during the war were in Asia, and these naturally impressed the 
 Asiatic mind more than the victories of France and England which were 
 won farther off. Intelligent and quick-witted Mahomedans and Hindoos 
 talked with Englishmen, English officers in India, and heard from them the 
 accounts of the manner in which our system had broken down in the 
 Crimea, of the blunders of our Government, and the shortcomings of our 
 leaders. They entirely misinterpreted the significance of the stories that 
 were so freely told. The Englishmen who spoke of our failures talked of 
 them as the provoking and inexcusable blunders of departments and in- 
 dividuals ; the Asiatics who greedily listened were convinced that they 
 heard the acknowledgment of the national collapse. The Englishmen 
 were so confident in the strength and resources of their country that it did 
 not even occur to them to think that anybody on earth could have a 
 doubt on the subject. It was as if a millionnaire were to complain to some 
 one in a foreign country that the neglect and blunder of a servant had 
 sent his remittances to some wrong place, and left him for the moment 
 without money enough to pay his hotel bill, and the listener were to 
 accept this as a genuine announcement of approaching bankruptcy. The 
 Sepoy saw that the English force in Northern India was very small ; and 
 he really believed that it was small because England had no more men to 
 send there. He was as ignorant as a child about everything which he 
 had not seen with his own eyes ; and he knew absolutely nothing about 
 the strength, the population, and the resources of England. In his mind 
 Russia was the great rising and conquering country ; England was sinking 
 into decay ; her star waning before the strong glare of the portentous 
 northern light. 
 
 Other impulses, too, there were to make sedition believe that its oppor- 
 tunity had come. Lord Canning had hardly assumed office as Governor- 
 General of India when the dispute occurred between the British and 
 Chinese authorities at Canton, and a war was imminent between England 
 and China. Troops were sent shortly after from England to China ; and 
 although none were taken from India, yet it was well known among the 
 native populations that England had an Asiatic war on her hands.
 
 1867. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 486 
 
 Almost at the same moment war was declared against Persia by proclama- 
 tion of the Govenor-General at Calcutta, in consequence of the Shah havinp 
 marched an army into Herat and besieged it, in violation of a treaty with 
 Great Britain made in 1853. A body of troops was sent from Bombay 
 to the Persian Gulf, and shortly after General Outrarn left Bombay 
 with additional troops, as Commander-in- Chief of the field force in Persia. 
 Therefore, in the opening days of 1857, it was known among the native 
 populations of India that the East India Company was at war with Persia, 
 and that England had on her hands a quarrel with China. At this time 
 the number of native soldiers in the employment of England through- 
 out Northern India was about one hundred and twenty thousand, while the 
 European soldiers numbered only some twenty-two thousand. The native 
 army of the three Presidencies taken together was nearly three hundred 
 thousand, while the Europeans were but forty-three thousand, of whom 
 some five thousand had just been told off for duty in Persia. It must be 
 owned that, given the existence of a seditious spirit, it would have been 
 hardly possible for it to find conditions more seemingly favourable and 
 tempting. To many a temper of sullen discontent the appointed and fate- 
 ful hour must have seemed to be at hand. 
 
 There can be no doubt that a conspiracy for the subversion of the 
 English government in India was afoot during the early days of 1857, and 
 possibly for long before. The story of the mysterious chupatties is well 
 known. The chupatties are small cakes of unleavened bread, ' bannocks 
 of salt and dough,' they have been termed ; and they were found to be 
 distributed with amazing rapidity and precision of system at one time 
 throughout the native villages of the north and north-west. A native 
 messenger brought two of these mysterious cakes to the watchman or head- 
 man of a village, and bade him to have others prepared like them and to 
 pass them on to another place. The token has been well described as the 
 fiery cross of India, although it would not appear that its significance was 
 as direct and precise as that of the famous Highland war-signal. It is 
 curious how varying and unsatisfactory is the evidence about the meaning 
 of these chupatties. According to the positive declaration of some wit- 
 nesses, the sending of such a token had never been a custom, either 
 Mahomedan or Hindoo, in India. Some witnesses believed that the 
 chupatties were regarded as spells to avert some impending calamity. 
 Others said the native population looked on them as having been sent 
 round by the Government itself as a sign that in future all would be com- 
 pelled to eat the same food as the Christians ate. Others, again, said the 
 intention was to make this known, but to make it known on the part of 
 the seditious, in order that the people might be prepared to resist the plans
 
 486 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxn. 
 
 of the English But there could be no doubt that the chupatties conveyed 
 a warning to all who received them that something strange was about to 
 happen, and bade them to be prepared for whatever might befall. One 
 fact alone conclusively proves that the signal given had a special reference 
 to impending events connected with British rule in India. In no instance 
 were they distributed among the populations of still-existing native States. 
 They were only sent among the villages over which English rule extended. 
 To the quick, suspicious mind of the Asiatic a breath of warning may be 
 as powerful as the crash of an alarm-bell or the sound of a trumpet. It 
 may be, as some authorities would have us to believe, that the panic about 
 the greased cartridges disconcerted, instead of bringing to a climax, the 
 projects of sedition. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF PLASSET. 
 
 THE news of the outbreak at Meerut and the proclamation in Delhi 
 broke upon Calcutta with the shock of a thunderclap. Yet it was not 
 wholly a shock of surprise. For some time there had been vague an- 
 ticipations of some impending danger. There was alarm in the air. There 
 had long been a prophecy known to India that the hundredth anniversary 
 of the battle of Plassey would see the end of English rule in Hindostan ; 
 and now the hundredth anniversary was near. There is a fine passage in 
 Sir Henry Taylor's ' Philip van Artevelde,' in which Van Ryke says to 
 the hero of the drama 
 
 If you mark, my Lord, 
 
 Mostly a rumour of such things precedes 
 
 The certain tidings ; 
 
 and Philip musingly answers 
 
 It is strange yet true 
 
 That doubtful knowledge travels with a spaed 
 Miraculous, which certain cannot match. 
 I know not why, when this or that has chanced, 
 The smoke outruns the flash ; but so it is. 
 
 The smoke had apparently outrun the flash in many parts of India during 
 this eventful season. Calcutta heard the news of what had happened 
 with wild alarm and horror, but hardly with much surprise. 
 
 For one or two days Calcutta was a prey to mere panic. The alarm waa 
 oreatly increased by the fact that the dethroned King of Oudh was established
 
 1867. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 487 
 
 uear to the city. At Garden Reach, a few miles down the Hooghly, the 
 dispossessed king was living. There he lived for many years after, with 
 his host of dependants and hangers-on round him. A picturesque writer 
 lately described the ' grotesque structures ' in which the old man, with 
 his mania for building, ' quarters not only his people but his menagerie.' 
 ' Tower after tower rises high above the lower buildings, on the top of 
 each of which, comfortably quartered in a spacious den, abides a huge 
 Bengal tiger, whose stripes glisten in the sun, in the sight of the passer-by 
 on the river. He owns vast flocks of trained pigeons, which fly or 
 alight at the word of command wild but not unmusical shouts of 
 coolies stationed on the housetops, who appear to direct their motions by 
 the waving of long bamboos. The inhabitants of Calcutta, when the 
 news of the mutiny came, were convinced that the King of Oudh har- 
 boured close to their city companions more dangerous than pigeons, or 
 even than Bengal tigers. They were sure that the place was the head- 
 quarters of rebellion, and were expecting the moment when, from the 
 residence at Garden Reach, an organised army of murderers was to be 
 sent forth to capture and destroy the ill-fated city, and to make its streets 
 run with the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Lord Canning took the 
 prudent course of having the king, with his prime minister, removed 
 to the Governor-General's own residence within the precincts of Fort 
 William. 
 
 There is no recklessness, no cruelty, like the cruelty and the recklessness 
 of panic. Perhaps there is hardly any panic so demoralising in its effects 
 as that which seizes the unwarlike members of a ruling race set down in 
 the midst of overwhelming numbers of the subject populations, at a 
 moment when the cry goes abroad that the subjected are rising in rebel- 
 lion. Fortunately, there was at the head of affairs in India a man with 
 a cool head, a quiet, firm will, and a courage that never faltered. If ever 
 the crisis found the man, Lord Canning was the man called for by that 
 crisis in India. He had all the divining genius of the true statesman ; 
 the man who can rise to the height of some unexpected and new 
 emergency ; and he had the cool courage of a practised conqueror. The 
 greatest trial to which a ruler can be subjected is to be called upon at a 
 moment's notice to deal with events and conditions for which there is no 
 precedent. The second-class statesman, the official statesman, if we may 
 use such an expression, collapses under such a trial. The man of genius 
 finds it his opportunity, and makes his own of it. Lord Canning thus 
 found his opportunity in the Indian Mutiny. Among all the distracting 
 counsels and wild stories poured in upon him from every side, he kept his 
 mind clear. He never gave way either to anger or to alarm. If he ever
 
 488 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxni. 
 
 showed a little impatience, it was only where panic would too openly have 
 proclaimed itself by counsels of wholesale cruelty. He could not perhaps 
 always conceal from frightened people the fact that he rather despised 
 their terrors. Throughout the whole of that excited period there were 
 few names, even among the chiefs of rebellion, on which fiercer denun- 
 ciation was showered by Englishmen than the name of Lord Canning. 
 Because he would not listen to the bloodthirsty clamours of mere frenzy, 
 he was nicknamed ' Clemency Canning,' as if clemency were an attribute 
 of which a man ought to be ashamed. Indeed for some time people 
 wrote and spoke, not merely in India but in England, as if clemency were 
 a thing to be reprobated, like treason or crime. Every allowance must 
 be made for the unparalleled excitement of such a time, and in especial 
 for the manner in which the elementary passions of manhood were in- 
 flamed by the stories, happily not true, of the wholesale dishonour and 
 barbarous mutilation of women. But when the fullest allowance has 
 been made for all this, it must be said by any one looking back on that 
 painful time that some of the public instructors of England betrayed a 
 fury and ferocity which no conditions can excuse on the part of civilised 
 and Christian men who have time to reflect before they write or speak. 
 The advices which some English journals showered upon the Government, 
 the army, and all concerned in repressing the mutiny might more fittingly 
 have come from some of the heroes of the ' Spanish Fury.' Nay, the 
 Spanish Fury itself was, in express words, held up to the English army 
 as an example for them to imitate. An English paper, of high and well- 
 earned authority, distinctly declared that such mercy as Alva showed 
 the Netherlands was the mercy that English soldiers must show to the 
 rebellious regions of India. There was for awhile but little talk of re- 
 pression. Every one in England well knew that the rebellion would be 
 repressed. It has to be remembered, to the credit of England's national 
 courage and resolve, that not at the worst moment of the crisis did it 
 seem to have occurred to any Englishman that there was the slightest 
 possibility of the rebellion being allowed to succeed. It is painful to have 
 to remember that the talk was not of repression but of revenge. Public 
 speakers and writers were shrieking out for the vengeance which must be 
 inflicted on India when the rebellion had been put down. For awhile it 
 seemed a question of patriotism which would propose the most savage 
 and sanguinary measures of revenge. We shall see farther on that one 
 distinguished English officer was clamorous to have powers given to 
 him to impale, to burn alive, and to flay mutineers who had taken part in 
 the murder of English women. Mr. Disraeli, to do him justice, raised 
 his voice in remonstrance against the wild passions of the hour, even when
 
 1M7. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 489 
 
 these passions were strongest and most general . He declared that if such 
 a temper were encouraged we ought to take down from our altars the 
 images of Christ and raise the statue of Moloch there ; and he protested 
 against making Nana Sahib, of whom we shall hear more, the model for 
 the conduct of a British officer. Mr. Disraeli did, indeed, at a later 
 period show an inclination to back out of this courageous and honourable 
 expression of opinion ; but it stands at all events to the credit of his first 
 impulse that he could venture, at such a time, to talk of morality, mercy, 
 and Christianity. 
 
 If people were so carried away in England, where the danger was far 
 remote, we can easily imagine what were the fears and passions roused in 
 India, where the terror was or might be at the door of every one. Lord 
 Canning was gravely embarrassed by the wild urgencies and counsels of 
 distracted Englishmen, who were furious with him because he even 
 thought of distinguishing friend from foe where native races were con- 
 cerned. He bore himself with perfect calmness ; listened to everything 
 that any one had no say, where time gave him any chance of doing so, 
 read as far as possible all the myriad communications poured in upon him, 
 regarded no suggestion as unworthy of consideration, but made his OWE 
 resolves and his own judgment the final arbiter. He was greatly assisted 
 and encouraged in his counsels by his brave and noble wife, who proved 
 herself in every way worthy to be the helpmate of such a man at such a 
 crisis. He did not for a moment under-estimate the danger ; but neither 
 did he exaggerate its importance. He never allowed it to master him. 
 He looked upon it with the quiet resolute eye of one who is determined 
 to be the conqueror in the struggle. 
 
 Lord Canning saw that the one important thing was to strike at Delhi, 
 which had proclaimed itself the head-quarters of the rebellion. He knew 
 that English troops were on their way to China for the purpose of wreak- 
 ing the wrongs of English subjects there, and lie took on his own respon- 
 sibility the bold step of intercepting them and calling them to the work 
 of helping to put down the mutiny in India. The dispute with China he 
 thought could well afford to wait, but with the mutiny it must be now or 
 never. India could not wait for reinforcements brought all the way from 
 England. In Scott's ' Betrothed,' the soldier of the knight who owns the 
 frontier castle encourages him, when the Welsh are about to attack, by 
 the assurance that the forces of the constable of Chester will soon come to 
 his aid, and that with these reinforcements they will send the Welsh 
 dragon-flag flying from the field. The knight sadly answers that it must 
 fly from the field before the reinforcements arrive, 'or it will ily over all 
 our dead bodies.' Thus felt Lord Canning when he thought of the strong
 
 490 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CH. xxxni. 
 
 arms that England could send to his assistance. He knew well enough, as 
 well as the wildest alarmist could know, that the rebel flag must be forced 
 to fly from some field before that help came, or it would fly over the dead 
 bodies of those who then represented English authority in India. He 
 had, therefore, no hesitation in appealing to Lord Elgin, the Envoy in 
 charge of the Chinese expedition, to stop the troops that were on their 
 way to China, and lend them to the service of India at such a need. 
 Lord Elgin had the courage and the wisdom to assent to the appeal at once. 
 Fortune, too, was favourable to Canning in more ways than one. The 
 Persian war was of short duration. Sir James Outram was soon victorous, 
 and the Persians sued for a peace. The treaty of Peace was signed at Paris 
 in March 1857, and was arranged so quickly that Outram inflicted a 
 crushing defeat on the Persians after the treaty was signed, but before the 
 news of its signature had time to reach the seat of war. Outram, there- 
 fore, and his gallant companions, Colonel Jacob and Colonel Havelock, 
 were able to lend their invaluable services to the Governor- General of 
 India. Most important for Lord Canning's purposes was the manner in 
 which the affairs of the Punjaub were managed at this crisis. The Pun- 
 jaub was under the administration of one of the ablest public servants 
 India has ever had Sir John, afterwards Lord Lawrence. John Law- 
 rence had from his youth been in the Civil Service of the East India Com- 
 pany ; and when Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjaub, he made Lawrence 
 and his soldier-brother the gallant Sir Henry Lawrence two out of a 
 board of three for the administration of the affairs of the newly acquired 
 province. Afterwards Sir John Lawrence was named the Chief Commis- 
 sioner of the Punjaub, and by the promptitude and energy of himself and 
 his subordinates the province was completely saved for English rule at 
 the outbreak of the mutiny. Fortunately, the electric telegraph extended 
 from Calcutta to Lahore, the chief city of the Punjaub. On May 11 the 
 news of the outbreak at Meerut was brought to the authorities at Lahore. 
 As it happened, Sir John Lawrence was then away at Rawul Pindee, in 
 the Upper Punjaub ; but Mr. Robert Montgomery, the Judicial Com- 
 missioner at Lahore, was invested with plenary power, and he showed thai, 
 he could use it to advantage. Meean Meer is a large military cantonment 
 five or six miles from Lahore, and there were then some four thousand 
 native troops there, with only about thirteen hundred Europeans of the 
 Queen's and the Company's service. There was no time to be lost. If 
 the spirit of mutiny were to spread, the condition of things in the Punjaub 
 would be desperate ; but what did the condition of things in the Punjaub 
 involve ? The possible loss of a province ? Something far greater than 
 that. It meant the possibility of a momentary collapse of all British 
 authority in India. For if any one will take the trouble to cast a glance
 
 1867. A HISTOKY OF OUH OWN TIMES. 491 
 
 at a map of India, he will see that the Punjaub i so placed as to become 
 a basis of operations for the precise military movements which every 
 experienced eye then saw to be necessary for the Having of our Indian 
 Empire. The candle would have been burning at both ends, so far as 
 regards the North-West Provinces, if the Punjaub had gone with Delhi 
 and Lucknow. While the Punjaub held firm, it was like a barrier raised 
 at one side of the rebellious movement, not merely preventing it from 
 going any farther in that direction, but keeping it pent up until the 
 moment came when the blow from the other direction could fall upon it. 
 The first thing to be done to strike effectually at the rebellion was to make 
 an attack on Delhi ; and the possession of the Punjaub was of inestimable 
 advantage to the authorities for that purpose. It will be seen, then, that 
 the moment was critical for those to whose hands the administration of the 
 great new province had been entrusted. There was no actual reason to 
 assume that the Sepoys in Meean Meer intended to join the rebellion. 
 There would be a certain danger of converting them into rebels if any 
 rash movement were to be made for the purpose of guarding against 
 treachery on their part. Either way was a serious responsibility, a 
 momentous risk. The authorities soon made up their minds. Any ritk 
 would be better than that of leaving it in the power of the native troops 
 to join the rebellion. A ball and supper were to be given at Lahore that 
 night. To avoid creating any alarm it was arranged that the entertain- 
 ments should take place. During the dancing and the feasting Mr. Mont- 
 gomery held a council of the leading officials of Lahore, civil and military, 
 and it was resolved at once to disarm the native troops. A parade was 
 ordered for daybreak at Meean Meer ; and on the parade-ground an order 
 was given for a military movement which brought the heads of four 
 columns of the native troops in front of twelve guns charged with grape, 
 the artillerymen with their port-fires lighted, and the soldiers of one of the 
 Queen's regiments standing behind with loaded muskets. A command 
 was given to the Sepoys to pile arms. They had immediate death before 
 them if they disobeyed. They stood literally at the cannon's mouth. 
 They piled their arms, which were borne away at once in carts by Euro- 
 pean soldiers, and all chances of a rebellious movement were over in that 
 province, and the Punjaub was saved. Something of the same kind was 
 done at Mooltan, in the Lower Punjaub, later on ; and the province, thus 
 assured to English civil and military authority, became a basis for some 
 of the most important operations by which the mutiny was crushed, and 
 the sceptre of India restored to the Queen. 
 
 Within little more than a fortnight from the occupation of Delhi by 
 the rebels, the British forces under General Anson, the Commander-in- 
 Chief. were advancing on that city. The commander did nc/t live to con-
 
 492 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES CH. xxxra. 
 
 duct any of the operations. He died of cholera almost at the beginning 
 of the march. He had lived long enough to come in for much sharp 
 censure. The temper of the time both in England and in India expected 
 men to work by witchcraft rather than wit, and Anson was furiously 
 denounced by some of the principal English journals because he did not 
 recapture Delhi without having even to march an army to the neighbour- 
 hood of the city. He was described as 'a holiday soldier who had never 
 seen service either in peace or in war.' His appointment was denounced 
 as ' a shameless job,' and a tribute altogether to ' the claims of family and 
 personal acquaintance.' We cannot venture now to criticise the mode of 
 General Anson's appointment; and he had not time to show whether he 
 was any better than a holiday soldier. But it would appear that Lord 
 Canning had no poor opinion of his capacity, and was particularly im- 
 pressed by his coolness and command of temper. He died, however, at 
 the very outset of his march ; and we only refer now to the severe attacks 
 which were made upon him to illustrate the temper of the nation, and the 
 manner in which it delighted to hear itself addressed. We are always 
 rebuking other nations for their impatience and fretfulness under diffi- 
 culties. It is a lesson of no slight importance for us to be reminded that 
 when the hour of strain and pressure comes we are found to be in most 
 ways very like our neighbours. 
 
 The siege of Delhi proved long and difficult. Another general died, 
 another had to give up his command, before the city was recaptured. It 
 was justly considered by Lord Canning and by all the authorities as of the 
 utmost importance that Delhi should be taken before the arrival of great 
 reinforcements from home. Meanwhile, the rebellion was breaking out at 
 new points almost everywhere in these northern and north-western regions. 
 On May 30 the mutiny declared itself at Lucknow. Sir Henry Lawrence 
 was governor of Oudh. He endeavoured to drive the rebels from the 
 place, but the numbers of the mutineers were overwhelming. He had 
 under his command, too, a force partly made up of native troops, and 
 some of these deserted him in the battle. He had to retreat and to fortify 
 the Residency at Lucknow, and remove all the Europeans, men, women, 
 and children, thither, and patiently stand a siege. Lawrence himself had 
 not long to endure the siege. On July 2 he had been up with the dawn, and 
 after a great amount of work he lay on a sofa; not, as it has been well said, 
 to rest, but to transact business in a recumbent position. His nephew and 
 another officer were with him. Suddenly a great crash was heard, and 
 the room was filled with smoke and dust. One of his companions was 
 flung to the ground A shell had burst. When thtire was silence the 
 officer who had been flung down called out, ' Sir Henry, are you hurt ? '
 
 I8&7. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 493 
 
 At first there was no answer. Then a weak voice was heard to reply in 
 just the words that Browning has put into the mouth of tin; gallant French 
 lad similarly questioned by the great Napoleon. 'I am killed,' was the 
 nnswer that came faintly but firmly from Sir Henry Lawrence's lips. 
 The shell had wounded him in the thigh so fearfully as to leave surgery 
 no chance of doing anything for his relief. On the morning of July 4 lie 
 died calmly and in perfect submission to the will of Providence. He had 
 made all possible arrangements for his successor and for the work to be 
 done. He desired that on his tomb should be engraven merely the words, 
 ' Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty.' The epitaph was 
 a simple, truthful summing up of a simple, truthful career. Tho man, 
 however, was greater than the career. Lawrence had not opportunity to 
 show in actual result the greatness of spirit that was in him. The im- 
 mense influence he exercised over all who came within his reach bears 
 testimony to his strength and nobleness of character better than any of 
 the mere successes which his biographer can record. He was full of 
 sympathy. His soul was alive to the noblest and purest aspirations. ' It 
 is the due admixture of romance and reality,' he was himself accustomed 
 to say, ' that best carries a man through life.' No professional teacher or 
 philosopher ever spoke a truer sentence. As one of his many admirers 
 says of him ' what he said and wrote, he did, or rather he was.' Let the 
 bitterest enemy of England write the history of her rule in India, and set 
 down as against her every wrong that was done in her name, from those 
 which Burke denounced to those which the Madras Commission exposed ; 
 he will have to say that men, many men, like Henry Lawrence, lived and 
 died devoted to the cause of that rule, and the world will take account of 
 the admission. 
 
 END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
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